


Defiance

by Requiem



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Firefly Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Mechanic Reyes, Slow Burn, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-02-22 09:27:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 105,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22613974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Requiem/pseuds/Requiem
Summary: It's been ten years since the Initiative first arrived in Heleus, eight since they surrendered to the kett and formed the Alliance. Since then, the crew of the smuggling shipDefiancehave been doing what they can to get by, until they pick up a passenger at Kadara Port one afternoon that throws them deeper into intragalactic politics than they'd ever like.
Relationships: Female Ryder | Sara & Male Ryder | Scott, Female Ryder | Sara & Reyes Vidal, Keema Dohrgun & Reyes Vidal, Male Ryder | Scott/Reyes Vidal
Comments: 44
Kudos: 38





	1. Brave New World

**Author's Note:**

> You don't need to have watched Firefly to understand this, but you should anyway because it's a great show. Also, the layout of _Defiance_ is mostly the same as _Serenity_.

A rocket from the fighter hot on their trail narrowly misses _Defiance_ and hurtles off into the Scourge, exploding in a blinding display of orange light. Reyes throws up a hand to shield his eyes so he can see the path through the Scourge that the ship's computer is mapping out on the console screen in front of him, and makes a small adjustment so Derc doesn't pilot _Defiance_ to her doom. And theirs, by extension.

The ship is rocked by another shockwave, this time from within as Lynx fires the starboard gun. They save the big guns for situations like this, and it's worth the repairs Reyes has to do afterwards to see one of the three dots following them drop off the tracker.

Crux isn't far behind with the port gun, and though another dot doesn't immediately vanish from the screen, Reyes sees it start veering off course then go careening wildly into the Scourge. Another explosion isn't far behind, this one much larger than the last, and Derc yells at Reyes to grab the secondary steering controls so they can force _Defiance_ to stay on course even as she rattles and groans and threatens to either crash or fall apart on them.

But she doesn't, because that's the kind of ship that she is, and they emerge from the Scourge only a little worse for wear and with no pursuit in sight. They've learned the hard way not to breathe easy until they're in FTL, but just as Derc and Reyes prepare to make the jump, something bumps against the bridge window.

"What's that?" Keema asks, leaning forward.

Reyes turns on the floodlights at the front of the ship so they can get a better look. "Looks like a primary buffer panel."

"Ours?"

Reyes switches his screen from navigation to diagnostics. On the diagram of the ship, a section on the nose—amongst other things—is blinking orange. "Could be."

"Is it important?"

In the time they've taken their eyes off it, the panel has bounced off the window and sailed into a wayward tendril of the Scourge that swallows it whole.

"Hope not." Reyes vaguely remembers it being mentioned in the 'landing procedures' section of the ship's manual, but there's nothing they can do about it now. He turns off the diagnostic screen so no one's distracted by the blinking light, and eases himself out of the co-pilot's chair. "I'm going to make a list of things that need fixing and see what can wait and what can't. You know how everyone in Kadara Port jacks up their prices."

And for good reason, what with it being the last free port in the galaxy and all. Overtly free, that is, all thanks to Sloane Kelly's indiscriminate shooting of anything that appears in the system that isn't authorised to be there. They've only taken a short day trip out of Govorkam, but still had to reapply for clearance, and they'll be broadcasting their credentials the moment they come out of FTL lest the automated defences shoot them down.

-

Kadara Port is much the same as Reyes remembers. In the last eight years or so, anyway. Compared to the pre-Alliance days, Sloane's more upfront about who runs the port, and from the moment they land, they're hit in the face with the Outcast logo splashed across every building and flying on flags above every rooftop. It's a symbol that's become synonymous with freedom, though few dare to wear it outside the system.

It's also an excuse for the people of Kadara to commit atrocities upon each other in the name of keeping it a free port, but that's not something Reyes involves himself in anymore. The entire system is guaranteed kett- and Alliance-free, and that's enough these days.

Keema, Crux, and Lynx pack the processors and circuit boards they'd salvaged into one of _Defiance_ 's shuttles and take it out to the Badlands to the fence who'd given them the tip about the battlefield a system away just waiting to be salvaged. It'd been little more than a pissing match between the Alliance and Resistance, but _Defiance_ had arrived early enough to beat the Resistance salvagers to the Alliance ships, and gotten away with enough salvage for the crew to be picky about what jobs they took for at least a month.

As Reyes opens the exterior hatch of the starboard battery and gets to work on the maintenance of the gun's suspension systems, Derc heads into the port to mingle with his fellow pilots and hear the latest news as well as find _Defiance_ some paying passengers, and Nakamoto makes a rare emergence from the medbay only to immediately disappear into the slums, medkit in hand. Despite all his complaining about how much running with a crew of smugglers goes against his fractured and flimsily-stitched-together moral code, for the last eight years, he's always come back when it's time to leave.

-

The afternoon sun is bearing down on the port when Reyes shifts his attention from the guns to the scorch marks along _Defiance_ 's hull. He's barely taken stock of the damage done by the Scourge when a familiar voice calls up to him.

"Kian!" Reyes wipes his brow on the sleeve of his shirt before jumping down to greet his old friend.

Kian deftly steps out of reach, warily eyeing Reyes' grease-stained hands.

"Fair enough," Reyes concedes. "Are you coming aboard?"

Kian hums in confirmation. "Keema's agreed to make a detour to Vesoa Station."

"Supply problems again?"

"When isn't it?" Kian grouses. He never leaves Kadara for less. "I'll be in my room."

Keema, Crux, and Lynx return with the shuttle then, which shouldn't be of note except that Keema remains on the catwalk above the cargo bay and waves at Reyes to come join her.

"Let me guess," Reyes says when he passes through the back of the shuttle on his way to the cockpit and sees that the crates there are still full of salvage, "Hanning is dead."

"Worse," Keema says. "He wouldn't buy. Apparently, Alliance goods aren't worth the fuel it takes to bring them in right now."

They can't force Hanning to take their goods since technically he'd only given them a tip and not a job, but it had been heavily implied he would be interested in a deal if they made it back to Kadara with the salvage.

"That little bastard," Reyes mutters. "He bother to explain why?"

"All he knows is his offworld buyers aren't touching Alliance goods right now, and he's already got enough salvage coming in from Elaaden to supply Kadara."

"Well that's a pain in the ass. Reckon anyone on Elaaden will take it?"

"Sure, but we'll be making a loss."

"If Alliance goods are as hot as Hanning says, I doubt we'd want to hold on to them for much longer ourselves. Better to take the loss and get us a proper job."

Keema considers this. "The crew won't be happy."

"They'll live." This isn't the first time a job's gone south in the last eight years.

It's thanks to Derc that they just avoid making a loss, because he finds two more passengers who can pay the full fare instead of the discounted rate they give Kian and their other irregulars from Kadara—connections are king on Kadara, since you never know who can score you an arrival slot when the port authority turns down your request.

First on board is an angaran botanist by the name of Vehn Terev who has a job waiting for him on Elaaden.

"They're still trying to make things grow there, huh?" Reyes says as he doctors the travel log in Vehn's omni-tool to make sure there's no mention of Kadara or the Govorkam system. It's a surefire way to be questioned by the Alliance, and that kind of scrutiny is not something they want to be under while sitting on a shuttle full of Alliance salvage.

"Yeah, still trying." Vehn takes back his omni-tool, hoists his pack onto his shoulder, and enters the ship without another word.

Next is a human named Scott with even less inclination for small talk, and whom Derc's charged some exorbitant, arbitrarily-calculated 'cargo handling fee' for the huge rectangular crate the dock workers wheel into the cargo bay. The fee's enough to cover fuel from Kadara to Elaaden with a quick stop in between at Vesoa Station, so Reyes doesn't pry into the box's contents.

Adding to the mystery, Scott's reluctant to give up his omni-tool and insists on making the modifications himself, shielding his screen from Reyes. He only turns it around briefly to prove he's changed _Destination: Kadara Port_ and _Origin: Kadara Port_ to Pashtara Station, but Reyes hasn't survived this long without having keen observation skills, and spots the top half of _Origin: Nexus_ at the bottom of the screen before Scott turns it off.

It's not really that interesting—people leave the Nexus all the time to join the Resistance or strike out on their own, and if Scott's only left recently he's right to be suspicious of everyone he meets—but Reyes makes a mental note to inform Keema later, just in case.

There's no extra cargo to load since they haven't made any money yet and don't have the credits to buy anything—thank the stars they still have rations and _Defiance_ isn't in need of urgent repairs—so once Nakamoto rejoins them, it's landing gear up and off to Vesoa Station.

-

Reyes is supposed to man the helm while Derc gets in his hour of sleep, but when they're in FTL there's little to do except watch the distorted streaks of space go by, so Reyes sits in the galley with the rest of the crew for dinner.

Kian, Vehn, and Scott are also there, so the crew can't have the usual discussion amongst themselves about their upcoming job. Reyes gets Kian going about new drinks he's come up with since they last met, which is a safe enough topic for everyone to join in, and it lets Reyes watch the other two passengers.

Vehn seems mildly interested in the topic, throwing out the names of a few angaran cocktails that Keema pretends she's never heard of before. Scott gives anyone who looks at him a tight smile or stiff nod, but other than that, stays out of the conversation and excuses himself the moment his plate is empty.

"I'm going to see if the repair I did on the port suspension is holding," Reyes says. "Comm me if anything on the bridge starts beeping."

He doesn't take the stairs all the way down to the port battery, but exits out onto the catwalk above the cargo bay, intending to cross over to the passenger quarters. Scott's in the cargo bay though, down on one knee in front of his crate with his back to Reyes. It's weird, but he doesn't seem to be doing anything, just kneeling there, so Reyes quietly backs up the stairs and makes more noise coming down.

This time, Scott hears him coming and is standing up by the time Reyes emerges from the stairwell.

"Ah, Scott. The cargo bay is off limits to passengers while we're in flight. Don't want you bumping into anything and causing a mess." Reyes flashes Scott a winning smile, and a blush immediately rises on Scott's cheeks.

"Sorry, I was on my way to my room and realised I'd forgotten something." Scott reaches out and grabs the first thing his hand lands on. "Got it! I'll go now."

"Come on, I'll lock up behind you." Reyes steers Scott through the lower door and sees him off to his room, then doubles back to the cargo bay for a closer inspection of the mysterious crate.

It's a standard security crate, likely of Initiative design, though without any markings or even a manufacturer's stamp on it. The lining of the crate resists the scanner in Reyes' omni-tool and the lock is a titanium alloy with a six-digit pin, so they'll have to break out the heavy equipment if they want to look inside.

Reyes scans the lock to get the most recently-pressed keys, and comes up with four numbers that he starts running through the password cracking software on his omni-tool. He’s not about to start trying the results in case there’s an alarm rigged to go off on incorrect attempts, but a list of the most likely candidates might come in handy later.

-

They dock at Vesoa Station in the Skeldah system some twenty hours later without incident, and bid Kian farewell. No one else bothers leaving the ship since Vesoa's just a small survey station populated by astronomers, physicists, and the rare traveller that's gotten lost. It's too small to even be a stopover point for ships passing through the sector. What business Kian could possibly have on the station and how he gets back to Kadara is beyond Reyes, but everyone's got their secrets.

They're three or four hours out from Vesoa when Derc pages Keema to the bridge. Reyes, in the crawlspace at the back of the ship elbow-deep in the auxiliary life support system, carefully pulls his hands out; the only reason Derc calls Keema to the bridge is because they have a problem. Reyes might be the ship's mechanic in name, but he's the one who started this endeavour with Keema, and when she's needed on the bridge, he's needed on the bridge, barring the ship being on fire. Given that he's waited a few seconds and nothing's hit them yet, Reyes wipes his hands on a rag and jumps down from the crawlspace.

Keema's all up in Derc's personal space when Reyes gets up to the bridge, which is an even clearer sign that trouble is afoot; Derc hates people crowding him, and Keema's about the least cuddly angara Reyes knows. Their attention is focused on the screen in Derc's console, and neither of them notice Reyes until he leans in from Derc's other side.

"Don't do that," Derc says, and the spell is broken as Keema takes a step back and Reyes leans in more to catch a glimpse of the screen.

"We've got trouble." Keema's already leaving the bridge.

"I gathered." Reyes follows her, figuring the action is wherever she's going and not on Derc's screen. "What sort?"

Keema rouses Crux and Lynx by banging on the doors of their quarters. "Something on board is broadcasting a signal to the Alliance. Derc says if we don't shut it off, they'll be all over us the moment we come out of FTL."

"Someone at the station?" Reyes asks, one step behind Keema as she strides towards the passenger quarters.

"No, it's been broadcasting since we left Govorkam. It has to be someone on board. And since it's not one of us, well, there are only two suspects left."

Vehn is in his room reading, and Scott's room is empty.

"Cargo bay," Reyes says, thinking of the crate Scott is obsessed with keeping an eye on. Reyes has spotted him several times looking through the window in the door to the cargo bay, though Scott hasn't tried to enter since the last time Reyes found him there. Or so Reyes had thought.

Crux ushers a confused Vehn along with them as Keema does an about turn and heads for the cargo bay. Sure enough, Scott is there, once again kneeling in front of his crate.

"Forget your toothpaste?" Reyes asks as Scott takes in the crew's sudden appearance and scrambles to his feet.

"I know I'm not supposed to be in here, but—"

"Where is it?" Keema cuts Scott off, a hand going to the knife she keeps on her belt as she takes a step forward.

"Where's what?" Scott looks bewildered; he's a good actor, Reyes will give him that.

Keema pulls out her knife and motions for Crux and Lynx to flank Scott. "I don't have time for games. Where's the transmitter that's broadcasting to the Alliance?"

"The Alli—why would I be trying to contact the Alliance?" Scott sputters.

"What's in the box?" Reyes asks. It's certainly large enough to be concealing radio equipment.

"Nothing," Scott says reflexively. He seems to realise his mistake and immediately moves to stand closer to the crate as if that will stop them from cracking it open.

"Open it." Keema gestures with her knife. It's not a big knife, but it's wickedly sharp, and Scott can't possibly miss that with how close it's getting to his face.

"No," he says, his voice wavering.

It's sad, really, how the young ones who weren't out of cryo back when the Initiative was fighting the kett give their lives so readily for the Alliance, like it's a cause worth dying for.

"Let me give it a try." Reyes pulls up the list of possible six-digit pins that he's saved to his omni-tool and sends them to the crate's receiver.

"I can't let you do that." The voice comes from behind Reyes, which no one expects, and which is why no one sees Vehn pull out a pistol in time to stop him from shooting Reyes.

A fiery pain rips through Reyes' left side, and his knees buckle and drop him to the floor before he can tell them to turn him around so he can punch Vehn in the face. The others dive for cover as Vehn fires off another shot and steps over Reyes like he's of no further concern. Reyes tries to reach out and grab Vehn's ankle, but his hand moves of its own accord to clutch at the bullet hole in his side instead.

"You'll be coming with me," Reyes hears Vehn say, but he can't see who Vehn is talking to.

From the direction of the door to the passenger quarters comes a hiss of air, then there's a heavy thump near Reyes' head.

"You'll be wanting him for questioning, I suppose?" Nakamoto steps over the threshold, tranquilizer gun in hand. "Then we'd best get him to the medbay before he overdoses."

Everyone in the cargo bay remains frozen until Keema barks out an order to get moving.

"What about me?" Reyes protests as he sees Crux and Lynx carry Vehn past him.

"I suppose you can come too," Nakamoto says noncommittedly. His footsteps indicate he's following the others to the medbay.

Keema comes to stand over Reyes and eyes him critically before shaking her head.

"Be honest with me, Keema, am I going to make it?" Reyes asks, affecting an overly faint voice.

"It barely scratched you." She crouches down, then Scott is also there, his face creased with concern.

"I am so sorry about all this." He tears off the hoodie he's wearing and pushes it against Reyes' side.

"First of all, ow," Reyes says. "Second of all, that's very sweet of you." He reaches up, intending to poke Scott's cheek with a finger, but the moment he moves his hand, copious amounts of blood spill from the wound in his side. "That's not good." His view of the cargo bay ceiling blurs for a few seconds before his vision restores itself, not quite back to a hundred percent.

"Keep the pressure on." Keema places Reyes' hand back, this time on top of the hoodie. "Grab his legs," she says to Scott.

Reyes is sure he's swearing the whole way to the medbay, but in his defence, his entire left side is on fire, and it seems to be forever until Scott and Keema are putting him down on a bed.

"You outlaws love to make things difficult for me, don't you?" Nakamoto says as he finishes up with Vehn, and Crux and Lynx cart him off. Keema also leaves, muttering something about being on the bridge if she's needed, and oh yeah, Reyes has just remembered that bit about broadcasting a signal for the Alliance to follow.

"You poor thing, Ryota," Reyes says without any sympathy. He turns to Scott, who's anxiously hovering over him. "It's real hard on him, being the only honest man on the ship."

"That's Doctor Nakamoto to you." Nakamoto comes over and peels away Scott's hoodie before dabbing something on the bullet wound with more force than Reyes is sure is entirely necessary.

He cries out before he can catch himself, and Nakamoto drops the bloodied wad of cotton onto a tray with a self-satisfied look on his face.

"Don't let him fool you though, he secretly loves it here," Reyes says once he has his breath back. "Why else would he have stuck with us through all these years?" He should really learn when to call it quits, because Nakamoto comes back with a needle and thread. "What happened to our medi-gel?"

"We used it all on Crux when she got shot during that job you lot pulled on Teroshe."

"That was ages ago!" Reyes can hear the beginnings of a whine starting to creep into his voice, but he _hates_ being stabbed repeatedly with sharp objects, especially when he's already injured. Doesn't everyone? "And she only got shot a little."

Nakamoto fixes Reyes with a hard stare. "She got shot, then electrocuted, then fell off a cliff."

"And she still made it back to the shuttle on her own." Crux had actually dropped into the valley just a few metres from where Reyes had been sheltering from the planet's electrical storms with the shuttle, and by the time he'd figured out what had happened, she was already up and walking towards him. Low gravity worlds had their perks.

"Nevertheless, there's no medi-gel."

Reyes is staring up at the ceiling, but he it's not doing a great job of distracting him from the press of cold metal on his left side.

"Don't move, or I'll have to start all over again."

Reyes manages to not embarrass himself in front of Scott, but he's definitely more lightheaded after Nakamoto ties off the last stitch than when he'd started, and by the time he's washed his hands and come back with gauze and tape, Reyes can barely be counted as conscious any longer. Before the gauze goes on, he feels something applied to the wound that tingles gently in the same way medi-gel does. Nakamoto might be a good doctor, but he can also be a real bastard sometimes.

Nakamoto has Scott roll Reyes onto his side to treat the exit wound Reyes can feel is dripping blood all over the bed, but he can't stay awake any longer and passes out with his face pressed against Scott's stomach. There are worse ways to go.

-

When Reyes wakes up, _Defiance_ is no longer in flight, and the other bed in the medbay is occupied by a young woman that he doesn't recognise. Scott is slumped over uncomfortably in a stool next to her, and doesn't stir when Reyes pushes his blanket down so he can pull up his shirt—someone's changed him into a clean one without bloodstains or bullet holes in it—and look at his wound. Not that there's much to look at, since it's still covered with only a few specks of red showing through the dressing.

"Don't touch that, you're going to live, and don't get up," Nakamoto says, turning his chair around. Reyes hadn't noticed him sitting at his terminal in the corner. "Any other questions?"

"Who is that?" Reyes points at the other bed.

"That's Sara Ryder, you've met her brother Scott Ryder, and yes, of the Alec and Ellen Ryder fame."

The names ring a very faint bell, but that's not what Reyes is interested in right now. "Where the _hell_ did she come from?"

"You managed to open the crate in the cargo bay as your last act before being shot. Turns out it was concealing a cryo pod. And a well-constructed one too, on par with the ones we crossed dark space in. She shouldn't suffer any ill effects from being in cryo. From what happened to her before she got in there, however…Scott can tell you."

Scott, awakened by their conversation, lifts his head and looks around. "Is something happening?"

"Nothing fun, you can go back to sleep," Reyes says. "Maybe in a bed?"

"No, I need to be here when Sara wakes up." Scott yawns and adjusts himself so he can rest his head on the bed, and takes one of Sara's hands in his.

Reyes watches them for a while before he remembers the other thought he'd had upon waking up. "Hey, are we on Elaaden?" he asks Nakamoto. He didn't think he'd been out _that_ long.

"No, we're on Mendradym, in the Kindrax system. Keema said she'd found a buyer here that would give a better price for the…goods you're carrying."

So that means the others are probably out making the trade and Derc's on standby in case they have to leave quickly, which leaves Reyes to entertain himself. However, his omni-tool is on his left arm, and he can't move it without igniting a sharp pain in his side.

"Have anymore medi-gel?" Reyes asks.

"I told you already, we have none left." Nakamoto turns back to his terminal.

"What did you put on me earlier, then?"

Nakamoto retrieves a small tube from the trash receptacle in the drawer next to him. "The very last of our emergency _emergency_ stash, which hasn't been replenished in over six months. We have absolutely no medi-gel left. Trust me, I've looked; I don't want to be stuck here with you anymore than you want to be here with me."

"How dare you," Reyes mutters. "Anyone would be lucky to be stuck with me."

He eventually drifts into a shallow sleep, but his nap is rudely interrupted by the ship jerking sharply to the right. He grabs the bedrail to keep himself from falling out, and groans as it pulls at his wound. He must have been in much deeper sleep than he'd thought, because he hadn't noticed when they'd taken off.

"Reyes, I need you in the engine room," Derc says over the ship's intercom. "We've got kett on our tail."

"Never a moment's rest," Reyes grumbles, forcing himself to take slow, deep breaths as he braces himself to sit up. Nakamoto's nowhere to be found. "Help me out here," Reyes says to Scott, sitting on the other bed protectively cradling his sister, who's awake and hyperventilating.

Scott makes to stand up, but Sara lets out an anguished cry and grabs at him, and they fall back onto the bed.

Reyes is saved having to drag himself up to the engine room by the appearance of Nakamoto and Crux, who grab an arm each and haul him up the stairs despite his protests to be gentle. Reyes adds 'elevator' to his mental wishlist of upgrades for the ship.

"It's funny; usually you're telling me to take it easy, not making things worse," he says to Nakamoto in between gasps for air.

"I can fix you if you tear your stitches, but if we get caught, there'll be no coming back from exaltation," Nakamoto says grimly.

"No, there won't."

Crux and Nakamoto dump him on the floor of the engine room then take up positions where he points.

"Ready when you are, Derc," Reyes says loudly so his voice carries up to the two-way intercom set into the wall above him.

"We're going left, on three," Derc says, and begins counting.

On Reyes' command, Crux disconnects the regulator, and Nakamoto pushes the hydraulic intake throttle for the port engine way past its recommended setting.

There's an awful grinding sound from beneath them as the port engine jams and _Defiance_ abruptly loses several metres in altitude while entering a tailspin. Her passengers are jostled every which way as the kett frigate passes them overhead, but they don't get time to recover before the heat vents and the controls reset and the port engine is spinning up again.

There's a sharp jolt and a piercing screech that tells Reyes _Defiance_ has scraped her keel along the ground, and he winces in sympathy as he pats the floor. With luck, it'll just be a repaint and not a replating, because he'll need the credits to replace the port compression coil after what they've just put _Defiance_ through.

The kett frigate is too large to turn around before _Defiance_ leaves atmo, and Reyes listens with satisfaction as Keema announces another successful escape. 

"We are en route to Elaaden, ETA twenty-three hours," Derc informs them once they're safely in FTL.

"Back to the medbay with you," Nakamoto says, pulling Reyes' arm around his shoulders.

"Put that regulator back before we explode," Reyes calls behind him to Crux. 

Sara's asleep by the time they get back downstairs, Scott sitting next to her gently stroking her hair. He looks up as Reyes and Nakamoto enter, but doesn't say anything.

As Reyes makes himself comfortable in the bed, Nakamoto goes to rummage through the drawers.

"What are you doing over there?" Reyes asks, distracted from asking Scott about his sister.

"Preparing a sedative," Nakamoto says. "Unless you think you can fall asleep yourself."

The throbbing in Reyes' side is getting fiercer with every passing minute and making it hard to breathe, so he gratefully holds out his arm; there'll be other chances to talk to Scott.

"I love you," Reyes says fervently, because openly showing affection makes Nakamoto uncomfortable and Reyes never passes up a chance to poke at him.

Nakamoto snorts, because they've known each other too long for him not to know that Reyes loves riling him up. "Kiss ass."

He sticks the needle into Reyes' arm, and everything starts to slide out of focus.

"How did the kett find us?" Reyes dimly registers Scott asking. "I thought we'd disabled the transmitter."

"It was likely in the area already," Nakamoto answers, "looking for someone to make an example out of. It's an open secret that this planet is frequented by smugglers, but there's little the kett and the Alliance can do but patrol it, because they also use it for trade. We just got unlucky today."

"Naughty children get the exaltation chamber," Reyes says dramatically, just to feel like he's contributing to the conversation that's happening over his head.

Nakamoto throws a blanket over his face.

"For smuggling?" Scott sounds horrified.

"There's nothing the kett hate more than people who refuse to fall in line," Nakamoto says.

"That's us," Reyes says, having partially extricated himself from the blanket. "Long live the Resistance," he adds for good measure even though it's been years since they've done anything for the cause because the last time they did, they lost their co-pilot Gartan, the starboard engine, and a whole section of the hull there.

"I didn't know it was that bad," Scott says softly.

Reyes wants to give the speech he always gives brand new fugitives who find themselves on the wrong side of the law for the very first time, but he's very sleepy and the blanket is very warm from being kept in the cupboard where the vent pipes run behind the wall, and his eyes keep closing no matter how hard he tries to keep them open.

"It's a brave new world out here," Nakamoto says for him in a completely flat tone.

"Fuck you," Reyes slurs right before he falls asleep, because one, that's his line; two, appalling delivery aside, Nakamoto didn't even say the whole thing; and three, Reyes _always_ gets the last word.


	2. The Convoy Job

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The crew takes on a job on Elaaden and quickly learns there's no such thing as simple and straightforward where Scott and Sara are concerned.

Elaaden's never quite lost its reputation for being full of batshit crazy scavengers with nothing to lose, and even now, the kett keep their distance. That's not to say that it's a free planet, though: Alliance outposts dot the unforgiving desert, heavily guarded and far from the scavenger settlements. The occasional enterprising commander will launch a clean-up operation to lower the scavenger population, but as far as Reyes knows, no one's made even the slightest dent. It's a combination of Elaaden's rich mineral reserves and the planetary defence cannon the krogan have at their colony that keeps the Alliance from bombing the planet and being done with it.

 _Defiance_ hardly ever visits Elaaden because angara don't do well in the heat and Keema's the captain so they go where she says, but she's told Reyes that despite making a little more on the salvage by selling it on Mendradym instead, they're still short of making a profit, especially with the extra fuel they'd burned getting away from the kett, so they're forging on to Elaaden to pick up some jobs.

Since it's hard for him to get down the ladder to his quarters, Reyes has been sleeping in one of the passenger rooms, which puts him in the perfect position to have front-row seats for Sara's screaming fits in the middle of the night. He hasn't gotten the full details out of Scott yet, but he's learned that Sara was captured by the kett over six months ago and experimented on. The fact that she's even alive let alone cognizant enough to recognise her brother is nothing short of a miracle, and Reyes can't begrudge her a few sleepless nights. Much.

After Nakamoto's previous comment, Reyes had looked up Alec and Ellen Ryder, just a cursory search that hadn't hit any secure databases, and to his surprise, had managed to turn up several news articles, most of them dated back to pre-launch days. Apparently, Scott and Sara's parents had been quite the intergalactic celebrities. The number of articles had tapered off after the Initiative's arrival in Heleus, and when Reyes had seen that one of the most recent ones had been an obituary for Ellen Ryder, he'd lost all interest in reading up on the Ryders any further. Everyone on the ship has their own reasons for being here, and they don't pry into each other's personal business.

 _Defiance_ 's total number of passengers remains at two, because Vehn had gotten loose on Mendradym while Reyes had been napping, and had tried to kill everyone on board, so Keema had shot him and tossed him out the cargo bay doors as they'd taken off. He was a low-level grunt that didn't know anything anyway, she'd told Reyes, and his main objective had been to return Sara to the kett and bring Scott in dead or alive for aiding and abetting her escape, not hunt down thieves and smugglers.

"We should turn them over to the Resistance," Reyes had said; it would be hard to earn credits with the Alliance chasing after them.

"Maybe we should." Keema had looked like she was considering a different option, but then she'd nodded. "Do you still have Evfra's comm frequency?"

-

 _Defiance_ lands at the Paradise, the only angara-run settlement on Elaaden and the main supplier of water. Those who don't want to rely on Annea's mood to determine whether or not they'll die of dehydration have tried to come up with ways to search for water underground or extract it from the air, or even hitting Alliance shipments of ice from their mining operations on the other moons and planets in the system, but none have been successful enough to rival her business.

Crux and Lynx head out for water and fuel respectively, and when they report no obvious Alliance presence in the vicinity, Scott and Sara venture off the ship for a breath of fresh air and to buy Sara her own clothes so she can return Crux's. Nakamoto stays on board because doctors are few and far between on Elaaden, and the scavenger gangs are not beneath kidnapping people, especially those who flaunt valuable skills.

"It's hot," Sara says, stopping at the bottom of the loading ramp.

"It'll be better in the shade." Scott turns around and closes the few steps between them.

"I don't like it." Sara tugs on Scott's sleeve. "Let's go somewhere else."

"There's no kett here," Keema says. "Can't say the same for other planets we might stop on."

"We'll just walk around for a bit, okay?" Scott says. "And if you still don't like it we'll come right back."

"Fine." Sara steps off the ramp and kicks at the sand. "Guess a walk will be better than staying on this junker."

"Don't let Reyes hear you say that," Keema says. "He picked her out himself."

"From where, a junkyard?"

Scott looks over his shoulder, presumably to check if Reyes is coming. Reyes, who's been in the cargo bay and within earshot for the whole exchange, raises an eyebrow.

"You wanted to go, right?" Scott says quickly, linking arms with Sara and ushering her away. "Let's go."

"She's not junk!" Reyes yells after them, loud enough to attract the attention of the other mechanics and salvage runners at the docks. Nobody calls his ship junk and gets away with it. "And don't join any gangs!" he adds as an afterthought, wondering if the two of them had ever left the sheltered confines of the Nexus before this.

Keema watches them go with a laugh, then turns back to Reyes. "Take it easy," she says. "Hire an extra set of hands if you need them."

"You know we can't afford that," Reyes says.

"We can't afford to lose you either." Keema may be as far removed from angaran society as Reyes is from the humans, but she still possesses her kind's propensity for wearing their emotions on their sleeve, and all angara have those eyes that seem to contain the depths of the galaxy.

"I'll commandeer Derc for the heavy lifting before he goes," Reyes is cowed into muttering by the intensity of her gaze.

He gets Derc to climb to the top of _Defiance_ and set up their communications array so he can send out a coded message to the last frequency he'd contacted Evfra on. The chances of it still being in use are very slim, but if the Resistance is still monitoring their old frequencies and recognises the code, they might send a message back.

Once Reyes confirms the signal is being broadcast loud and clear, Derc bids him farewell to hit up the bar. Reyes might be the one with the contacts, but Derc is the one who seeks them out whenever _Defiance_ docks in a new port, making discreet inquiries, filtering out the scavengers and gangs that even they won't deal with, and pointing the rest towards Reyes, who turns up the charm and squeezes them for every last credit or bit of information they have to give.

Right now though, he's under _Defiance_ lying on his back and looking up at the mess that's been made of her keel. Some of the scratches are only superficial, but others go right into the metal, which means he'll have to strip the paint and repolish a significant portion of the keel, a job better suited for a team of mechanics with an automated buffing machine, not the handheld one Reyes has in his toolbox.

Being on Elaaden where there's salvage to trip over with every step means replacing the worst-off panels and manually polishing the rest could be cheaper than getting them repaired, so Reyes takes some measurements and heads into the settlement proper himself. Then, he discovers that though the parts themselves might be cheaper, the cost of hiring help to pull off the old panels and install the new ones puts him back to square one. With the others still off procuring supplies or looking for jobs, he's just going to have to suck it up and get to work, starting with the shallower scratches in case by some miracle they scrape together enough money for a replating.

-

By the time the others start trickling back, he's made fair progress, but his side is aching fiercely from the strain of holding his arms up and tensing against the vibration of the buffer to hold it steady.

Derc comes back last and gathers everyone around the dining table in the galley to hear what job prospects he's found them. He projects a map of the area around the Paradise onto the table, which contains several bright spots that he points out. "There's a salvage cache out in Languish, guarded by a dozen scavengers at most; easy money if we bring both shuttles and come at them from the air. Then over in Gehenna Valley, there's an outpost run by a gang that one of their rivals wants taken out. Dangerous, but could be good money; the contact I spoke to wasn't upfront about a figure."

"Pass," Reyes says. They've had too many bad experiences with clients who can't settle on a figure before they accept the job.

"We couldn't take on an outpost anyway, not if they have anti-aircraft guns," Crux says.

"We could if we brought _Defiance_ ," Lynx says. "Her guns have long enough range."

"No way," Reyes says. He's not risking their only ticket off this planet for a few extra credits. Well, the shuttles are capable of FTL, but they're only good for a ride, not as a home.

"What else have we got?" Keema says before Reyes and Lynx get sidetracked with a discussion of _Defiance_ 's combat capabilities. Lynx doesn't know the extent of the care needed just to keep her running, let alone after she's been in battle.

"Delivery job in Hell's Promise—pocket change, that one—and a tip about an Alliance delivery of medical supplies to a settlement across the Sea of Ataraxia."

"How good's the tip?" Keema asks. "And how many shuttles in the convoy?"

"Three. Contact's Alywn Gresser. He's given us good intel before."

"Right, the weapons cache," Reyes says.

The last time they'd been on Elaaden, over a year ago, Gresser had sold them the location of a weapons cache near the flophouse that had been a veritable gold mine. Of course, there'd been hundreds of angry scavengers to contend with, and it had been through sheer luck that they'd come out of it with an intact ship and crew, but the intel had been good.

"I'm voting for the medical supplies," Reyes says. Their medbay could use a good restocking, especially of medi-gel.

"That's bound to bring the heat down on us," Keema says. "Especially to attack a convoy directly like we'd have to if we want to pull this off."

"But we'd make a small fortune," Lynx says. Reyes can see her already making a mental list of things to buy with her cut.

Crux shrugs and says she doesn't care as long as they have a job, Derc agrees that the medical supplies will make them the most money if Keema deems the risk worth it, and Nakamoto, as usual, puts on his don't-involve-me-in-your-shenanigans face and says nothing.

"Medical supplies it is. You're not coming, of course," Keema says to Reyes.

"Maybe not on the ground, but I can still fly," Reyes protests.

"For a shuttle pilot, you've got a notoriously bad track record of staying with your shuttle."

So he hates the thought of his friends running headlong into danger without him, what about it? "I'll be on my best behaviour, promise."

Keema ignores him and turns to Scott. "Do you know how to shoot?"

Scott looks like he's contemplating lying, but then he nods. "I used to be a security guard on the Nexus."

"That…counts, I suppose."

"You must be joking," Reyes says. He hasn't been even in the same system as the Nexus for nearly ten years, but from what he's heard, it's hardly a hotbed of crime. Crime probably doesn't exist there anymore, what with the kett having made it their secondary seat of power in the cluster and the threat of exaltation looming over anyone who so much as _thinks_ of toeing the line.

"I can shoot," Scott says indignantly. "I was the top marksman of my graduating class."

It takes all of Reyes' self-discipline to not laugh at how little such an accolade means outside of the Alliance and whatever standardised ranking system they've put into place.

On the other hand, Scott's clearly never seen active combat, and he's not going to get far in his new career as an outlaw without the experience. Better to get it while he's with people who'll watch his back.

"Take him." Reyes leans back in his chair. "I've got some vids I wanted to catch up on anyway."

Scott looks nervous at Reyes' sudden change of heart. "What am I doing, exactly?"

"We'll take the shuttles and lie in wait in the dunes until the convoy approaches," Keema says. "Then we fire up the engines, shoot them down, land, shoot whoever tries to get in our way, take their cargo, and leave. It's a simple plan. We'll handle the flying, and all you'll have to do is shoot."

"I don't think—I've never shot anyone before." Scott's looking between the crew as if trying to ascertain if Keema's serious or not.

"Ever been shot _at_?" Crux asks.

"Not really."

"Well, it'll come easily once your only options are shoot or be shot, trust me."

"And you only paid for the fare to Elaaden, so unless you intend on getting off here or have more credits up your sleeve, it's time to start earning your keep," Reyes adds. They hadn't dumped Scott and Sara the moment they'd landed out of a mixture of sympathy for their plight and admiration at escaping from under the watchful eye of the kett, but _Defiance_ is a smuggling ship, not a charity.

"This was the furthest I could get with what money I had left." Scott sighs. "I'll do the job, but someone has to keep an eye on Sara."

They all turn to look at Sara, who's standing in front of the microwave watching it with fascination as she presses buttons at random. Something is sparking inside, and Scott hurries over to turn it off.

"She can sit on the bridge with me," Derc says. "Lots of buttons up there."

"Buttons for flying the ship," Reyes says, struck by a vivid image of falling out of the sky the next time they take off.

Derc shrugs. "Won't do anything if the power's off, and pre-departure checks will pick up on anything out of place."

He's not wrong, but… _pilots_ , honestly.

-

Reyes doesn't sit in his room watching vids like he'd said he would, but lurks on the bridge under the pretence of making sure Sara doesn't break anything. In reality, he's keeping an ear on the ship's comm, which is patched directly into the line the others are using to keep in touch as they lay the ambush for the convoy.

"What does this do?" Sara asks, rapidly flicking the transponder switch.

"That vents the oxygen from the lower decks," Reyes says. "Try that again when we're in space and your brother's down there."

Sara stops playing with the switch and squints suspiciously at Reyes. "What about this one?" She rolls the knob for the rudder trim back and forth.

"That sets the speed the engines spin at. Try turning it all the way down while we're in atmo and see how fast we drop out of the sky."

Derc rolls his eyes and explains a few of the switches, buttons, knobs, and screens, then asks, "Do you want to learn how to fly?"

"No, it sounds boring." Sara turns away from him and slouches down in the co-pilot's chair, arms crossed over her chest.

Great, now no one's having fun.

-

Sara falls asleep in the chair and Reyes reaches over her to restore the controls she's fiddled with to their original positions. Keema's voice comes on over the comms then, instructing Crux and Lynx to approach the convoy from the front while she and Scott attack them from behind. The shuttles' microphones are set to push-to-talk mode, so the bridge is quiet until Crux announces one of the Alliance shuttles has escaped their ambush.

"Scott and I will go after it," Keema says. "You two clean this up. If you find the goods, let us know and we'll turn back."

Sara wakes up at the mention of Scott's name. "Scott?" she says in a small voice.

"He's not back yet," Reyes says. "Why don’t you go back to your room and lie down?"

"No, I'm waiting for Scott." Sara rearranges herself so that her knees are drawn up to her chest and she can rest her chin on top.

It's about fifteen minutes later that Crux and Lynx report turning up nothing but dead Alliance soldiers and a few ration bars, canteens, and used fuel cells.

"Want us to back you up, Captain?" Crux asks.

"No, we've landed and we're going in on foot," Keema replies in a low voice. "We'll take it from here, you two salvage whatever you can before the scavengers get there, then return to the ship."

"Copy that."

There's nothing over the comms for nearly forty-five minutes until Crux is requesting for the port shuttle hatch to be opened.

"Someone gonna help us unload?" Lynx asks.

"I'm convalescing," Reyes says when Derc looks expectantly at him. "No heavy lifting, captain's orders."

Derc sighs and leaves his chair, and Reyes immediately sits down and grabs the microphone. "How're things looking?"

"Get off the comms," Keema says.

"Just give me a hint, I'm dying to know."

"We're two people walking into an Alliance outpost to rob it. I don't need you in my ear being a distraction."

"Just think: if you'd brought me along, I could have been a distraction in person."

"Reyes."

"Fine, I'll be here if you need me."

It's quiet for twenty minutes, then Keema says, "Found them. Get Crux and Lynx to bring the second shuttle to the navpoint I'm sending you and be quick about it, they're getting ready to distribute the supplies. We'll stall for as long we can."

"They're civilians," Scott hisses, loudly enough for Keema's radio to pick him up.

"Civilians with guns who won't hesitate to shoot us when we're not looking," Keema snaps. "Be quiet, and keep your eyes on the door."

"He giving you trouble?" Reyes asks even though he knows Scott can hear him.

"Like you wouldn't believe," Keema says through audibly gritted teeth.

"Wishing you'd brought me instead?"

"I can handle him. Get off the comms."

-

Despite whatever misgivings Keema has about Scott, the rest of the job goes smoothly from there: Crux and Lynx arrive at the outpost with the shuttle and airlift the supplies away, allowing Scott and Keema to escape in the ensuing chaos. Reyes catches snippets of Keema shouting at Scott in between coordinating the heist, and it sounds like things have escalated from mere annoyance to real anger, but they're safely on the shuttle and off the comms before Reyes can overhear how the argument ends. 

The port shuttle docks a few minutes before the starboard one, and Reyes is in the cargo bay looking over their haul when Scott and Keema disembark, still arguing.

"That's enough," Keema says in the voice that's stopped gang wars in their tracks before.

Scott, however, isn't deterred. "It's not too late."

"I said, _enough_." Keema shoves Scott out of her way and storms down the stairs.

"Something wrong?" Crux asks.

"Don't listen to a word he says," Keema says as she sweeps past.

Up on the catwalk, Scott looks down hopefully at them, but Reyes, Crux, and Lynx quickly make themselves scarce; an angry captain is not to be disobeyed.

Which is a lesson Scott obviously hasn't learned, because he brings up the argument again at dinner when they're all together in the galley.

"The outpost needs that medicine," he says. "They've been waiting for months."

"So what?" Lynx says. "The Alliance will send more. If they've waited this long, they can wait a little longer."

"Not if they have Antropoff's disease," Nakamoto says. "I had a look through the crates like you said to," he nods at Keema, "and most of the medicine in there is used to treat Antropoff's. Very lucrative on the black market for its…recreational uses, but patients who don't receive regular doses rapidly start to decline. If it's been months since their last shipment as you say…well, the recommended schedule for receiving doses is once a week."

"What disease is this?" Keema asks.

"That's the human name for it, but just about every space-faring race has had experience with it. It's what happens when miners of element zero breathe in too much of the dust and it gets into their lungs, their blood, their nervous system. Everyone's reaction to it is different, and some don't show symptoms for years or at all, but for those that do, the experience is like living in a body that won't listen to you: eventually, you forget to breathe, or your heart stops pumping, or your legs give out on you when you're crossing a rope bridge over a bottomless chasm." Nakamoto explains all this in the same detached tone of voice he uses for everything. "There's no real cure, but with regular medication most people manage to live a somewhat normal life."

"You've seen some shit," Reyes says. Nobody knows what Nakamoto did in the Milky Way, but he's taken being a part of a gang then working out of a shipping container in the slums then joining a smuggling ship far too well to not have been out to the Terminus before.

"Enough to suggest we return half the medicine. The other half should still fetch a tidy sum, enough to make even you lot happy."

Keema's face is impassive.

"The Alliance probably won't send more shipments after this." Scott is quick to take advantage of the silence. "Three successive failed deliveries is more than enough for them to write off the outpost as an acceptable loss."

"Acceptable loss?" Crux asks.

"If the cost of keeping an outpost running outweighs the benefits it provides the Alliance, they'll start cutting funding, usually in the form of stopping resupplies. On other planets, the outposts might be able to get by relying on the locals for trade, maybe even get back on their feet and reapply for funding, but out here? They probably won't last much longer."

Reyes doesn't doubt it. In fact, he's almost certain that if the scavengers get wind of an Alliance outpost that's fallen on hard times, they wouldn't hesitate to swoop in and help themselves to whatever meagre supplies the colonists had left. And, likely, to the colonists themselves.

Crux looks at Reyes, who looks at Derc, who looks at Lynx, who looks at Keema.

They might be thieves and smugglers and on occasion, hired thugs, but they have _standards_. On the other hand, they're in dire need of credits.

"What good would it do them if we return this one shipment only for them to run out weeks from now and be left in the same position?" Keema asks.

"You saw how they handled themselves, and that was with nearly all of them weak from the disease. If they were at full strength, I think they could find a way to turn things around," Scott says earnestly. His eyes are bright with hope, and Reyes wants to knock him down a few notches before the weight of disappointment crushes him.

"We're returning the supplies," Keema says. "All of them. Scott, with me."

"You must be joking," Reyes blurts out. He makes it a point not to argue with Keema in front of anyone who's not crew—and even then he'll try to hold out for a private confrontation—but for years now, it's been _Defiance_ first and everyone else second, and it's a philosophy that's seen them through the worst of what the universe can throw at them.

"We can take another job. But I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight with an outpost full of civilian deaths on my hands that I could have prevented."

"I'd sleep better knowing we're not flying around with an exposed hull," Reyes mutters. "Or a compression coil on its last legs. Or a ventral airlock that doesn't quite seal all the way when the pressure inside is just right. But you're the captain."

"We're not murderers," Keema says firmly. "We'll take another job. Have one lined up by the time I get back."

She and Scott leave the galley.

"Keep some medi-gel for me!" Reyes yells after them. He'd seen some in the boxes Crux and Lynx had brought back, and now he's regretting not skimming a pack or two while he had the chance.

"What was that about the airlock?" Crux asks.

"Don't worry, it's the one under the bridge. You never go there."

Derc is staring at Reyes.

"It's the lower hatch, and you can't even hear the air escaping unless you've got your ear right up against it," Reyes tells him.

Derc narrows his eyes.

"Forget I said anything."

They go back to Derc's list of jobs and pick out the softball ones that are about as dangerous as going for a walk. Which, considering where they are, can actually be quite dangerous, but those jobs also pay half upfront, and if they get truly desperate, they can grab the cash and go. It'll be a black mark on their reputation and _Defiance_ will likely never be allowed back to the Paradise, but at least they won't be broke.

Keema's left behind a box of medi-gel with Nakamoto, whom Reyes convinces to use some on him, just enough to close his wound on the surface and ease some of the pain, putting him back in condition to at least fly a shuttle.

He picks up a delivery from the outskirts of the Paradise, drops Crux and Lynx off at the navpoint of the salvage cache, then flies the delivery across the gaping sinkhole large enough to swallow an outpost to a tiny cluster of buildings that he would have missed on a regular fly by. The buildings are either larger on the inside or the scavengers have expanded their base underground, because there's no way the crates they pull off the shuttle could possibly fit into the shack they're being loaded into. Whichever it is, Reyes isn't getting paid to think about things like this.

He turns around and picks up Crux and Lynx and the salvage they've unearthed, which will have to be stowed in the cargo bay until they can get to a different system that will pay more for scrap metal and remnant tech. In the meantime, the delivery job's made enough money for Reyes to buy new plating for _Defiance_ 's keel, and until Derc comes back with more jobs, he can conscript Crux and Lynx for the repairs.

-

It's late into the night by the time Keema brings back Scott and the other shuttle, not that anyone can tell, what with Elaaden's endless day. That _Defiance_ 's clock is about eight hours behind the local time doesn't help either.

"You've all been hard at work," Keema says as she takes in the sight of the three of them sweaty and stripped down to as few layers as they dare walk around in. They've all remained armed, of course; the Paradise is no Kadara Port, and guns are fair game here.

"You took an awfully long time," Reyes says. Four hours, by his count, for a journey that should have taken half an hour at most each way plus an extra ten minutes to find somewhere to drop the supplies. He would have checked in with Keema at the two hour mark if he hadn't been so engrossed in his work.

"We'd thought to drop the goods and run, but the colonists spotted us."

"And it took you three hours to fight them off?" Reyes hazards a wild guess. Keema's not covered in blood though, and there hadn't been enough time between the shuttle docking and her coming outside to have cleaned it off.

"Quite the opposite, actually. They invited us in to talk."

"That's code for something." Reyes squints at her.

Keema chuckles. "Not this time. Come inside, it's getting late."

The story goes like this: Keema circles around and approaches the outpost from a different direction than before, then sets the shuttle down behind a rocky outcrop, out of sight of the outpost. Or so she'd thought. After she and Scott unload the medical supplies, a group of colonists round the corner.

"They spout some inspiring drivel about seeing the good in others and supporting each other through hard times, then tell us there's something in the outpost they'll give us if we want it," Keema says.

"You believed them?" Reyes asks. "And you went with them?"

"We didn't exactly have a choice," Scott says. "There were about six of them, all armed."

Crux shakes her head in disapproval. "One of you should have stood guard while the other unloaded."

"So I underestimated the colonists," Keema says. "Everything still turned out all right. Do you want to hear how the rest of it goes or not?"

The colonists had dug up a piece of remnant technology made up of interlocking prisms that shifted and glowed when touched. They frequently found broken chunks of remtech while searching for eezo, but nothing still intact like this, and hadn't known what to do with it.

"What are we supposed to do with this?" Reyes asks, holding it up for a closer look.

"We could try to find a buyer for it," Derc suggests.

"The only remtech buyers I know who'd be interested in a curiosity like this are deep in Alliance space," Reyes says. Most people are only interested in remtech that can be repurposed into something useful. It's the kett who have some weird fixation on the remnant, deploying recon and recovery teams to every ruin that's discovered, and they hold all their researchers close to home.

Sara, who's been watching the pulsing blue glow, enchanted, leaps out of her chair and plucks the piece of remtech from Reyes' hands before he even registers her coming towards him. Then she all but runs out of the galley, down the stairs to the passenger quarters.

"That's that," Keema says.

"We're just going to let her take it?" Lynx asks.

"Unless we can find a buyer, it's not worth much to us. Make sure she doesn't blow anything up with it," Keema says to Scott. "Everyone else, get some rest. I want us to have a full docket of jobs tomorrow, even if they're all just delivery runs. We need the credits, and we can't afford to be picky."

-

The next morning, Derc has barely been off the ship for five minutes when he's back, slightly unsettled. For someone who's not even the slightest bit ruffled when being fired upon by a half dozen frigates while weaving through the Scourge, this is big news.

"Alliance are in the port," he says. "Scores of them. Looking for two fugitives: a brother and sister."

Derc, Reyes, and Keema are the only ones in the cargo bay right now, so they have the chance to think about how they want to come at this new problem before anyone starts panicking prematurely.

"Someone must have seen them in the port yesterday," Reyes says, thinking of the only time Scott and Sara had gone out together.

"But how would news of their escape have spread so quickly?" Keema asks. "There haven't been any news bulletins or bounties posted of them."

"The Alliance must be keeping it quiet," Derc says. "But that's not important right now; it's only a matter of time before someone remembers seeing them come back to this ship. What do we want to do?"

"We should—" Keema begins.

She's interrupted by rapid footsteps pounding down the corridor from the passenger quarters. Scott appears in the doorway and says, "The kett are coming. We have to go."

"Did you see them?" Reyes frowns—the only windows on the ship are in the cargo bay doors and on the bridge.

"No, Sara says she can sense their presence."

"She can…" Reyes, Derc, and Keema exchange looks ranging from confused to skeptical.

"I know it sounds weird, but please, let's go. I'll do whatever you want me to if we still need money, but somewhere else, please."

"There have been sightings of Alliance in the port," Keema says slowly.

"But kett? Here?" Reyes is tempted to poke his head outside for a look even though _Defiance_ is parked on the lower side of the port and he won't be able to see anything, but it never progresses to more than a thought, because Sara starts screaming. Scott runs back towards the passenger quarters, and Lynx comes out of the port shuttle and gives them a quizzical look that Reyes answers with a shrug before following Scott.

Sara's stopped screaming by the time they get to her, and instead is sitting on her bed with an unnatural stillness.

"What's wrong?" Scott sits down next to her and pulls her close.

"They're coming." She turns wide eyes on Scott. "They'll kill you. You should let them take me."

"No!" Scott gently exclaims. "We're not going to let that happen."

Reyes turns around. The rest of the crew are gathered in the lounge outside the medbay, even Nakamoto, who says, "Are we throwing them to the wolves, or are we running?"

"Or throwing them to the wolves _and_ running?" Reyes muses. "I vote running," he says over his shoulder when Scott makes a noise of outrage.

"I think—" Lynx begins.

"We're running," Keema says. "The Alliance are no friends of ours, and they haven't even posted a bounty."

"You'd sell us out for a bounty?" Scott asks.

"Not today," Keema says. "Everyone to positions in case we have to go out hot."

'Everyone to positions' means Reyes in the co-pilot's chair monitoring their sensors and scanners, and bringing anything of interest to Derc or Keema's attention.

They haven't cleared their takeoff with the docks manager, and an angry message comes over the open channel that Reyes turns off. _Defiance_ doesn't have any registration markings on her bow to identify who she belongs to, or any external modifications that mark her out from the tens of thousands of other Luciérnaga-class ships, so even if the Alliance does find out who owns the ship—Reyes, technically, if the seller had bothered to change the registration details—they'd have no way of tracking her down.

Through the bridge window, Reyes can see a few Alliance shuttles lifting off, and he searches for them and tags them on the target tracker for Crux and Lynx in case Keema wants them shot down.

"What's our course?" Derc asks as he brings _Defiance_ up in a spiral pattern.

"Anasa," Keema replies without hesitation.

"There's nothing out there," Reyes says. He vaguely remembers the Collective setting up a few listening posts in the system and some exiles declaring they would try to settle there, but it's been a long time since he's heard from, or of, either.

"Exactly."

Keema's a good captain and they don't as a general rule argue with her when she makes a decision, even when it seems as nonsensical as this one, so Reyes sets their course and Derc points _Defiance_ towards the system. The Alliance shuttles chasing them don't let up, but Keema only gives the order to fire once the shuttles start shooting. Reyes watches with satisfaction as they drop off the scanner and briefly laments the fact that others will be profiting off the salvage, but he doesn't get to dwell on it long before he spots something coming towards them on the scanner. Something much bigger than a shuttle.

"Gun it, Derc," Reyes says as he tries to glean more information from the scans. "We've got trouble coming."

"As if we don't have enough already." Keema leans over Reyes' shoulder. "What is it?"

The scanner resolves an image. It's nothing good.

"Kett frigate," Reyes says.

"Well, I'll be damned. The girl was right."

Distantly, beneath the gunfire and the hum of the engine, Reyes thinks he can hear Sara screaming again.

"We don't have time for a fight," Keema says. "Give the engine everything it's got and get us out of here."

"To Anasa?" Derc asks. "Won't do us any good to be stranded in the middle of nowhere with no fuel."

"Fuel won't do us any good if we get captured by the kett, either. Take us to Anasa."

"Missiles incoming!" Reyes puts Crux and Lynx on shooting down the two missiles the kett frigate has just launched at them. "Maybe they're not looking to capture."

"No, they would have opened fire long before now," Keema says. "Their guns have far longer reach than ours. Those missiles were targeted strikes."

"So they can outshoot us," Reyes says. "But can they outrun us?" Kett frigates don't come equipped with tractor beams like their larger cruiser counterparts do, but they do pack a mean grappling hook that could slow _Defiance_ down enough for the Alliance to catch up if they get close enough to use it.

"That stunt we pulled on Mendradym is not going to work here," Keema says.

"Hey, I've got more than one trick up my sleeve," Reyes says. "Take a seat, and push that button when I tell you."

He sprints to the engine room and pushes up the fuel intake lever in one swift move, flooding the fuel lines and causing the engines to eject thick, black smoke. Derc can yell at him for wasting fuel when they're out of reach of the kett. Reyes then instructs Keema to push the button he'd pointed out to her, which triggers the missile bay doors at the aft of the ship. Only, they don't have missiles, they have canisters that explode once in the air and disperse shredded aluminium behind them. It'll confuse the scanners of any pursuing ships, and coupled with the loss of visual, should allow _Defiance_ to make a clean getaway. Figuratively speaking, of course; the residents of the Paradise will likely be cleaning up for a while.

"Haven't seen that one in a while," Keema says over the intercom.

"And you won't until we make port again and I can restock the canisters," Reyes replies. "How are we looking?"

"We're clear, I think," Derc says. "Set the engines to full thrust and let's get out of here."

"You don't need to say that again."

Reyes starts the drive core spinning in preparation for their jump to FTL, and Derc abandons the spiral ascent pattern they'd been following in favour of a more straightforward route now that their pursuers can't get a lock on them. The moment the altimeter in the bank of instruments on the wall tells Reyes they've cleared Elaaden's atmosphere, he engages the drive core, and _Defiance_ disappears safely into the black.


	3. Objects in Space

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keema takes _Defiance_ out to the middle of nowhere for a private chat with Scott and Sara, but trouble still manages to find them.

_Defiance_ arrives in Anasa to a whole lot of nothing. No one's been able to figure out why, but the system just isn't predisposed to supporting organic life despite a number of planets and moons looking like perfect candidates on paper. The angara haven't been able to make the system work for them, neither have the kett, nor the Initiative and its exiles. Anasa looks doomed to being a desolate wasteland for the foreseeable future, which makes Reyes wonder why Keema's brought them here.

"Everyone to the galley," she orders over the intercom. "Especially our two hangers-on. I'm calling this meeting just for you."

It's Reyes' turn to cook lunch, so he's already in the galley and gets to watch everyone as they shuffle in. The crew's expressions range from curious to confused, Scott looks like Keema's just threatened to space him, and Sara's not at all interested in the proceedings and has to be dragged over to the dining table.

"Let's get straight to business," Keema says, standing next to the airlock leading off the galley that they hardly ever use. "This is an airlock, and if my questions don't get answered, you and you," she points at Scott and Sara, "are going in. Then I'll be shutting the door on this side, opening the door on the other side, and very soon after, you will find yourselves in the sweet embrace of the stars with no one around to rescue you. Are we clear?"

Scott swallows nervously. "What questions?"

Keema joins them at the dining table. "When we landed on Elaaden, there wasn't so much as a kett shuttle in sight, and the Alliance were minding their own business far from the Paradise. Now, we don't like to make trouble for people who can make big trouble for us, and with the way we left, I'm sure Annea's not going to want to hear our names, let alone see us in her port ever again."

"I told you the Alliance would come after us, and you said it wouldn't be a problem," Scott says.

"That was when I thought you two were just run-of-the-mill fugitives who'd have their faces plastered all over the extranet for a few weeks until the Alliance gave up. Now, you have no bounty and not even a hint of your escape has reached our considerable web of contacts, yet within a day, the Alliance and even the kett have scrambled forces to retrieve you, which suggests there's something larger at stake here. Something personal, even. And between the six of us, we already have enough personal problems to take into account when deciding which port to land at and which jobs to take"—Keema's looking at Reyes, which just isn't fair since he's the one with the most public presence after her—"without having you two add to that list. So tell me again, and spare no detail this time, what did you do?"

Scott looks back and forth between the others at the dining table as if hoping one of them will spring him from this interrogation, but there's not a single sympathetic face to be found.

"About a year ago," he says, looking down at his interlaced fingers on the tabletop, "Sara started acting weird. She told me she was working on a new project, that it was exciting but she couldn't tell me anything about it yet. She was…so happy, but I'd never known her to be so secretive. Then six months later, she stopped calling, sending emails. I reached out to some of her coworkers to see if she'd maybe been sent away on short notice and hadn't been able to check in yet, but they said they hadn't seen her in months.

"I waited another week for her to get in touch, but when there was still nothing, I started contacting everyone we'd ever met. None of them knew about the secret project she was supposedly working on, and none of them had seen her or heard from her since it'd started. So I went back to before then, and tracked her movements around the cluster, which was already weird by itself because she'd never moved around for work before. Then the Alliance called me in for questioning. They wanted to know if Sara had ever been to Eos."

A chill runs through the room at the mention of Eos; a little over six months ago, the Alliance had mercilessly and without warning bombed everything within a ten kilometre radius of their main outpost there, killing all soldiers and civilians in the vicinity and leaving behind nothing but a large crater. Treason had been the official reason, with no further elaboration. Someone, somewhere, had crossed a line, and the kett had retaliated by destroying the first foothold the Initiative had struck in the cluster, but word was, not a single kett vessel had made up the bombing fleet. In the following weeks, after the flames had burned out, the dead left to lie, and the bereaved had nothing left to do but move on, the message continued to burn brightly across the cluster: we can make you do anything we want.

"I told them that as far as I knew, Sara had never been to Eos, and they searched our house, looked through my emails and call logs, and told me it was a case of mistaken identity. But I couldn't get it out of my head, so I looked into the passenger manifests for shuttles going to Eos in the week before the bombing, and I found her name on a flight to Prodromos. I thought she was gone." Scott glances at Sara, who doesn't appear to be listening as she carves something into the tabletop with her fingernail.

"There weren't any official death notices sent out so I couldn't be sure, but I had to keep looking. For a corpse, a trail, anything. I spent two months contacting other outposts on Eos to see if she'd passed through, then finally, someone told me they'd seen a kett ship take off from Prodromos just seconds before the bombs started falling. It was a long shot, but I used every connection and favour I had to find out which ship it was, then to obtain the flight recordings. There was one outgoing call made to the Archon's flagship just after leaving atmo, and in it, someone said, 'We have her, and the evidence has been destroyed.'"

"It could have been anyone," Keema says.

"I know," Scott says. "But I couldn't give up until I knew for sure. So I went back through my contacts and got them to reach out to their contacts until I got in touch with someone who worked on the Archon's flagship and convinced them to snoop around and look for the prisoner that was taken from Eos."

"A lot of work for one person," Reyes says. "You don't have other family in Andromeda?"

"There's my father." Scott's face darkened. "He's never thought well of the unification—he quit his job as a commander rather than join the Alliance—and I thought he would back me up when I told him I had proof Sara was being held captive on the Archon's ship. Instead, he told me to forget about it and said I was forbidden to go after her, and that if I did, he would turn me in for treason."

"And like the good brother you are, you completely ignored him."

"Of course. I wasn't going to let the Archon keep Sara, no matter what she was supposed to have done."

"How did you get her out?" Keema asks.

"More money. She was put into cryo whenever the Archon left his flagship, and I paid someone to swap her cryo pod with a crate that was scheduled for delivery to the Nexus. But I couldn't bring her back there, not after knowing what my father would do, so I gave the flight plans of the transport to some pirates, and had them hijack it and bring Sara's cryo pod to Kadara Port, which was the only place I knew she would be safe from the Alliance. But they would know that too, and it would be the first place they looked, so I had to get as far away from there as possible, and booked passage on the first ship going to Elaaden. You know how the rest of it goes."

The galley is silent for a while as everyone digests Scott's story.

"And you still don't know what the Archon wanted with her?" Nakamoto asks.

"No, she doesn't even remember being on Eos," Scott says.

"But I can still hear you," Sara says, not looking up from the gouge she's carved into the table. Scott takes hold of her hand to stop her, and she finally looks up.

"What do you remember?" Nakamoto asks.

"Home. On the Citadel, on the Nexus. A lab. Scott says that's where I worked. The Archon's ship. The Archon. Asking questions. Poking around inside my head. Couldn't remember anything then, either."

"So the memory loss started before you woke up from cryo?"

"I guess."

"Would you let me run some brain scans the next time we land somewhere with the equipment?"

"No." Sara bares her teeth at Nakamoto. "No more looking in my head."

"So it _is_ personal," Keema says. "You're the Archon's pet project for some reason or other, and he wants you back. Alive."

"You're not really going to space them, are you?" Crux asks with a frown. She's adapted remarkably well to a life of crime, but Reyes sometimes forgets she'd fought for a cause once, had believed the Collective could do better by Kadara, and had only signed on with Keema and Reyes when the Collective had disbanded and those beliefs had been shattered.

A beeping noise from the bridge interrupts whatever Keema was going to say.

"That's the long-range scanner," Reyes says as Derc goes to check it out. He listens to the beeping a little longer. "Whatever it's picked up, it's not coming towards us. Not quickly, at least."

It's still enough for Keema's attention to be diverted, and she and Reyes follow Derc up to the bridge to investigate.

"Transport," Derc says. "Appears to be running on emergency power, but she's not sending out a distress signal."

"Let's get a visual," Keema says.

Derc turns _Defiance_ towards the dot on the scanner and gives her a bit of thrust to get the transport within visual range. What they see is congruent with the scanner results: a lone ship drifting aimlessly through space, millions of kilometres from the nearest possible landing zone.

"Trap?" Derc asks.

"Nothing else on the long-range," Reyes says. According to _Defiance_ 's long-range scanners, they're alone in this sector of the system. "Short-range says all the escape pods have been launched and there aren't any life signs on board."

"Let's see if the previous occupants left anything valuable behind," Keema says.

-

Derc lines up their airlock with the transport's, and since there's no one on the other side to complete docking procedures, Reyes and Lynx don EVA suits and manually link the two ships.

Keema instructs them to board the transport and check the integrity of its life support so the rest of them know whether to suit up or not. Lynx used to work in water filter maintenance on Kadara so she knows what to look out for and how to read the information screens, and Reyes leaves that to her while he heads for the engine room to try and determine what caused the passengers to evacuate.

He passes the passenger cabins and looks inside to see two or three bunks crammed into each tiny room; this is a colony ship then, carrying some forty or fifty passengers and the basic supplies needed to start a life on a new planet. More often than not, these small-scale colonisation efforts result in death by starvation, dehydration, or overexposure to the elements. It looks like this expedition has met a different end, but what?

The drive core and engines are in perfect condition, and Lynx reports that life support is running as best it can under the limited power, so the ship wasn't abandoned for mechanical reasons.

"Escape pods were launched over a week ago," Lynx says.

"They're long gone, then," Keema says. "Let's take what we can."

"We should siphon whatever fuel's left," Reyes adds. Derc is starting to sound like the fuel gauge warning system with how many times he's mentioned their dwindling supply since leaving Elaaden.

"I'll have Derc do it. I need you back here for something else."

Reyes makes his way back to _Defiance_ and goes to take off the EVA suit, but Keema stops him and sends him outside to check the ship's exterior.

"What am I looking for?" Reyes asks as he attaches himself to the tether. He's not a fan of mid-flight repairs as the gloves on the suit seriously hamper his fine motor control, but he won't complain if a repair now means they won't be stranded in between systems later.

"Anything out of the ordinary," Keema says unhelpfully. "You know the ship best." That more than anything makes Reyes nervous; if she's buttering him up, it must be something serious.

Or it could be that she's just being paranoid, because as far as Reyes can see, _Defiance_ is not much worse for the wear than is to be expected after their hasty escape from Elaaden.

"You've got to give me something more to go on," Reyes says. "It'll take me hours to go over every bit of the ship. Am I looking for something small? Something big?"

"Not sure, but try looking under the ship."

Reyes pushes himself down the side, grabs hold of the tiny crack at the bottom of the cargo bay door to steady himself, and shines his helmet light along _Defiance_ 's keel. There seems to be an unusual bump about where the lower bomb bay doors are, and Reyes pushes himself in for a closer look in case they haven't closed properly, but then a warning should have appeared on the bridge and—shit.

"Keema?" Reyes says. "There's a bomb on my ship."

"I was afraid you'd say that."

-

"Next time, just come right out and say, 'Reyes, I think there might be a bomb on the ship'," Reyes says as he raids the engine room for potential bomb-defusing tools. "I can handle it."

The scans he'd taken of the bomb indicate it's of the kind used by raiders who booby-trap ships they've hit with a device that attaches an explosive to any rescue or salvage ship that docks, rigged to go off once the second ship goes out of range of the transmitter in the bait ship. The resulting explosion won't be large enough to destroy the ship—don't want to damage the goods, after all—but it will cause depressurisation fast enough that anyone on board won't survive.

"Can you?" Keema's rummaging through their box of spare electronics, though Reyes isn't sure what she's hoping to find there. "How are you handling it now?"

"Fine!" Reyes shuts the drawer he's holding a little harder than is necessary.

"Really."

So he'd shut the drawer _a lot_ harder than necessary, but he's under a significant amount of stress here. "Everything is going to be fine. Bomb defusal is definitely one of my skills." Reyes is lying through his teeth, and they both know it; the only bomb-like device he's ever worked with is _Defiance_ 's drive core when he's overclocked it in an attempt to outrun pursuit, but that's on purpose and easily reversed. This? Not so much.

"What about jamming the signal so it can't tell when we've gone out of range?" Keema holds up a scrambler.

"I wouldn't trust that." Scramblers are incredibly illegal, and ones that work properly are hard to come by. Reyes had picked that one up broken at a liquidation sale, and though he's fixed it up as best he can, he's not putting their lives in the hands of one of his side projects.

"Is there anything on this ship that works properly?"

Reyes holds up the tools he's chosen: a flat-head screwdriver, and a small knife.

Keema's face is impassive. "I'll be on the other ship. Try not to blow up."

-

From what Reyes can see and what his omni-tool is telling him, the bomb is only attached to _Defiance_ 's keel with an adhesive, and prying it off shouldn't trigger the detonator. There's no way of being sure, but the bomb had to be stable enough to be fired from the bait ship without exploding, and there would be little point in placing a receiver inside if it was volatile enough to explode on movement.

Reyes first tries cutting into the adhesive, but his knife isn't thin enough to slip into the gap between the bomb and the ship, and a thinner one probably won't be strong enough, so he murmurs a quiet apology to _Defiance_ and uses the screwdriver to make a chip in her paint, then starts peeling it off.

He doesn't want to jar the bomb with any sudden movements too close to it, so the amount of paint that comes off is a considerably larger area than what the bomb covers. Still, he'll bear the annoyance of repainting if it means not blowing up.

Once the bomb's completely detached from the keel, Reyes sends it on its merry way away from _Defiance_ and the transport. He watches it go for a while, then there's a flash of light, and without anything solid for the explosion to travel through, a weak shockwave that barely even reaches Reyes that the others definitely wouldn't have felt.

"Guess who's not blowing up today?" Reyes cheerfully announces over the shared channel.

"I thought we were going to keep that between us," Keema says drily.

"Whatever for? We should be celebrating my bomb-defusing prowess. Find anything good on that ship?"

"Raiders took most of what the colonists left behind, but they did leave some protein supplements and seeds as bait. Should fetch more than enough to make this a worthwhile trip, even with the Alliance's stamp over everything."

"Glad to hear it. I'll see you in the cargo bay soon."

By the time Reyes finishes going through the post-spacewalk procedures—they might be criminals, but some rules are still worth following—everyone is waiting in the cargo bay. For him, apparently.

"So, how did you defuse the bomb?" Keema asks.

"I cut the blue wire," Reyes says. "Just like in the vids."

"They cut the red wire in the vids," Lynx says.

"I'm pretty sure it's the green wire," Crux says.

"It makes no sense for all bomb makers to adhere to the same wiring standards," Derc says.

Reyes leaves them to argue and motions for Keema to follow him up to the galley; in the excitement of Scott and Sara nearly being spaced and encountering the transport ship, lunch has been left half-prepared.

"I pulled it off the ship, gave it a gentle push away from us, and when it went out of range of the transmitter, it exploded," Reyes tells Keema when they're out of the cargo bay. "You didn't think I really knew how to defuse a bomb, did you?"

He intends on leaving Keema alone with lunch as payback for her leaving him alone with a fucking _bomb_ , and so he can duck over to the transport ship to see what parts he can strip from the engine to use in _Defiance_ , but neither of these things happen because they've barely entered the galley when the long-range scanner starts beeping again, only this time with increasing volume and frequency.

Derc's still in the cargo bay, so Reyes slides into the pilot's chair and initiates disengagement from the transport ship.

"Raiders?" Keema asks, sitting in the co-pilot's chair.

"Worse." The dot on the scanner indicates a cruiser-sized object, which no raiders should have been able to get their hands on. "Alliance, most likely."

"How did they find us? Could the bait ship have been set by them?"

"Not even they'd stoop so low, but they may have been lying in wait to see who came to investigate it." It seems unlikely to Reyes that the Alliance would waste an entire cruiser to catch a single raiding or salvage ship, but figuring out the _why_ is not as important to him right now as figuring out the _how to get away_.

"We've got Alliance!" Reyes calls the crew to action as he guns the engine. If the cruiser gets any closer, it's going to catch them in its tractor beam.

Derc appears on the bridge and Reyes relinquishes his chair, waving away Keema when she makes to stand up.

"I'll be of more use in the engine room," he tells her.

One of the good things about being in the windowless engine room is that he can't see how close the cruiser is getting, and he can keep his movements steady and purposeful as he preps the drive core to take them into FTL in a sudden burst, not gradually like it usually does; if the cruiser sees them make ready to jump, it could start opening fire.

"Let's get out of here," Keema says.

Reyes presses the intercom button. "Not yet. Derc, buy me another minute."

"You got it." Derc pulls _Defiance_ into a sharp right then a downward spin.

Reyes can hear loose items flying about the galley—there'll be a lot to clean up later, provided there is a later—as he seals off the engine room and kills the artificial gravity so he can work while Derc is performing evasive manoeuvres.

When the drive core is vibrating with the force of all its pent-up energy, Reyes gives Derc the all-clear to bring them right side up and take them into FTL. The energy is released all at once, making Reyes' teeth tingle as a mass effect field envelops _Defiance_ and takes them out of reach of the cruiser.

Reyes restores everything in the engine room back to its original settings, then starts putting the galley to rights so they can finally have lunch. The vegetables that had been rehydrating in the sink have gone on a journey across the ceiling and down the wall on the other side then been buried under a mountain of protein bars, so Reyes writes them off as a lost cause and makes a note in his omni-tool to check the maglocks on the cupboards later.

Lunch instead comes out of whatever cans were damaged in their escape, thrown into one pot to make a mystery stew that everyone devours without complaint since they're all so hungry.

"I think we should check Sara for trackers," Reyes says after lunch from the safety of the small lounge in the corner, far away from where Sara is sitting in case she finds the idea objectionable and decides to do something about it.

"I think so too," Scott says, to Reyes' surprise.

"No." Sara turns her glare on Scott.

"There's the scanning software we use on the cargo we bring aboard," Crux suggests. "Scott could download it to his omni-tool if you'd rather he run the scan."

"I thought we scanned the whole ship again after disposing of Vehn Terev," Keema says.

"Right, all his stuff and every place he'd been to, but not Sara."

"Scan the whole ship, and I mean the whole ship this time, in case someone got the drop on us while we were parked on Elaaden. Scott, make sure your sister isn't broadcasting our location to the Alliance, or I really will space the two of you."

After hours of carefully combing over the ship inside and out, even the places where no one could have gotten to without leaving a sign or one of the crew noticing, _Defiance_ is declared free of trackers, but Sara is not. In fact, every part of her seems to be emitting a signal, likely through some kind of nanotechnology. The signal doesn't seem strong enough to transmit through the walls of the room Sara's currently in let alone the hull of the ship, but the Alliance finding them twice—thrice, if they count the kett on Mendradym—after Sara came on board is too many times to be a coincidence.

"They didn't find you on Kadara, though," Reyes muses.

"We're not putting her back in cryo," Scott hisses, standing protectively in front of Sara in case Keema makes good on her spacing threat.

They're in the medbay lounge with Sara asleep in her room and Nakamoto in the medbay examining a drop of her blood he'd accidentally acquired after failing to get her to agree to a proper blood draw.

"I was actually thinking about the security crate you had the cryo pod in," Reyes says. "They're designed to stop signals getting in to scan their contents, but my guess is it works just as well the other way around."

"Or maybe the trackers get sleepy when they're cold," Lynx says. "I'm not saying we should put her back in cryo, just getting the idea out there," she adds when Scott glares at her.

"I doubt the temperature would make a difference," Nakamoto says, coming out of the medbay. "It's more likely that the signals were blocked by mechanical means, like Reyes said."

"How much does it hurt you to agree with me?" Reyes asks.

"Not at all, because I'm an adult and I don't let my personal feelings get in the way of work."

"Liar." If that were true, Nakamoto wouldn't take such joy in pretending they're out of painkillers whenever Reyes drags himself into the medbay to be patched up.

"Let's open up that crate and see what's so special about it," Keema says.

Reyes goes upstairs to fetch a power saw from the engine room, and by the time he gets back downstairs, the others have opened the crate and begun taking apart the cryo pod on the cargo bay floor.

After cutting the crate open to examine its inner workings, they're disappointed to find that it contains no secret method for keeping scanners at bay, just the standard technique of using thick layers of different metals to block signals of any wavelength from getting in, which they can't replicate on _Defiance_. Not on a large scale, anyway.

"Between this crate and everything else in the cargo bay, we should have enough to shield Sara's room," Reyes says.

"She can't stay in there forever," Scott says.

"No, but it's a good short-term solution," Keema says. "Unless you've already forgotten that your other two options are cryo or the airlock." She looks at the disassembled cryo pod and the security crate. "Actually, your only other option is to go out the airlock."

"You could drop us off at the nearest planet. I really was planning to leave the ship when we reached Elaaden until Vehn turned out to be Alliance."

"And that would have worked out for you as poorly as it's nearly worked out for us. You're really better off staying."

"So you're…going to help us?"

"I suppose," Keema says nonchalantly. "But if a bounty comes up, all bets are off."

Scott's hopeful face falls, and Keema claps him on the back as she leaves.

"She's joking, right?" Scott asks the rest of them.

Reyes shrugs. "With her, who knows?" She probably is, but just in case she's not…"I'm sure she'd give you plenty of warning if she decides to sell you out."

-

Crux and Lynx put up the shielding around Sara's room while Reyes goes back to the scrambler Keema had picked out earlier. If he can get it working reliably, it might be a suitable long-term solution for Sara's problem, with the caveat that she'd have to keep it on her at all times, and any electronics on her person won't be able to receive or transmit a signal, but it's got to be better than being stuck in a tiny room whenever they're not in FTL.

Keema finds Reyes the next morning in the engine room with the box of spare electronics strewn across his workbench. The scrambler was originally designed to block all signals entering or exiting a room, but if he can divert the power to influence a smaller area, that might solve the fluctuating strength problem.

"We'll be pulling in to Zyrik Station soon if you need to pick anything up."

"Faross System," Reyes says. "Sure it's safe to be so close to Anasa and Zaubray after the Alliance found us in both?"

"We'll be quick; Crux says we don't have enough lead to finish sealing off Sara's room. And the station is isolated enough that there might be people desperate enough to buy some questionably-sourced Alliance-stamped rations."

"I'll stay here, I have an idea and everything I need should be in this box." Reyes gives the aforementioned box a shake and more electronic components fall out, adding to the mess already on his workbench. "I just have to find it first."

An hour later, they pull in to Zyrik Station, technically a supply post on an asteroid founded by the Outcasts. After unification, it's grown into a semi-popular stopover point for smuggling ships travelling between Kadara and Elaaden. Most prefer to make the trip in one jump though, which is why Zyrik has never blossomed into the criminal hub it has the potential to be.

Reyes has been into the station several times, but he sees none of it on this visit, sequestered in the engine room as he is. Keema makes good on her promise to stay only for a while, and within the hour, they're taking off and jumping to FTL with not an Alliance ship in sight.

Reyes comms Keema instead of walking the twenty-odd metres over to her quarters because although he wants to know where they're going, he's just about figured out how to stop the scrambler from emitting an electric shock every time it receives a signal of a certain wavelength. "Where to next?"

"Kadara Port. The Resistance wants to get in touch."

"Glad as I am that our signal reached someone, is it really a good idea to be flying into Govorkam right now without being certain that our most wanted passenger isn't lighting up Alliance scanners like it's the night of the Perseids?"

"It'll be about twenty-four hours before we get there. Crux and Lynx will be finished with Sara's room by then."

"Is the whole place sealed off? Corners, floor, ceiling? We don't even know for sure if it'll work."

"You can inspect the work if you're worried about it, but I think Sloane can handle an Alliance cruiser or two if they show up. How fares your project?"

"It might be working by the time we make port." Reyes positions a radio transmitter at one end of the workbench and a receiver on the other, then places the scrambler in the middle and turns it on. "It's a little hard to test when I don't even know what it's supposed to block, but I'll make do with what we have. I make no guarantees of it being Alliance-proof though. The best way to test it would be to park ourselves for a few hours in a system with known Alliance patrols and see if they come knocking. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean—"

The door to the engine room opens, and Keema comes in. "Did your comm stop working?" she asks.

"It's fine, I was just talking to you." Reyes toggles his comm on and off anyway to check, and hears the affirmative beep in his ear that it's functioning properly.

"No, you weren't," Keema says. "Why do you think I came down here?"

"Because you miss my scintillating presence?" Reyes is about to show Keema what he's done so far when he looks down at the workbench and everything makes sense. He takes a few steps back. "Can you hear me now?" he says into his comm.

"You're standing right in front of me," Keema says.

"Yes, Keema, I know, and you damn well know I meant through your comm."

She grins at him. "I heard you." The two of them swap places. "Can you hear me?" Keema asks.

"Can't hear a thing," Reyes says with satisfaction. "Next stop, Kadara Port."


	4. A Night on the Town

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's more to Kadara Port than just illegal trading and people who carry knives to get around the gun embargo. Not much more, but there is.

Sloane is hosting one of her 'pacify the populous' parties, and Keema only has one ticket.

"How could you do this to me?" Reyes exclaims when she breaks the news. "You know I love a good party."

"This is a business meeting." Keema's got her good clothes on, and she never wears them just to meet with contacts; she's planning on enjoying this party long after the business part is over.

"You really couldn't have asked for an extra ticket? Doesn't every captain need their second-in-command for backup?"

"That would be me," Crux says, which is true, if only on paper.

"You hate Sloane's parties," Reyes reminds her. "You would have pawned the job off to me and I would have gladly taken it. You know, if there'd been a second ticket."

"He said come alone, so I'm going alone, and that's final." Keema slides a knife into the sheath strapped to her right thigh. Kadara Port might be gun free and more or less politically stable these days, but it's still a dangerous place. "The rest of you are to restock our supplies, complete whatever repairs need to be done, then you're free to do what you like until tomorrow morning. Except you two." Keema looks at Scott and Sara. "You're to stay on the ship. People here might hate the Alliance almost as much as the Resistance does, but they wouldn't hesitate to sell you out if they knew the Alliance wanted you."

"I can see why you people like it here," Scott says.

"You're more than welcome to take your chances out there, just don't plan on coming back."

Keema leaves, Reyes sulks for a while as he checks all the maglocks on the drawers and cupboard doors in the galley and medbay, then Derc comes up from the cargo bay with a barely-suppressed smile on his face.

"Guess what?" he says. It's not like him to be coy, so whatever he has must be good.

"You found a way to intercept mining transports while they're in FTL?" Reyes guesses. It's been a long-time project of his and Derc's; just one shipment of Helium-3 will sell for enough to keep _Defiance_ afloat for years without needing to take on additional jobs. Unfortunately, they're heavily guarded at the start and end of their journey across the cluster, and the only way to grab one is while it's in FTL. The technology isn't available yet, but everyone needs a dream.

Derc scoffs. "If only. You'll have to settle for this instead."

Reyes' omni-tool pings; it's two barcodes admitting entry to Sloane's party. "Are these real?"

"Picked them up in Tartarus from an Outcast guard who lost a bet. I'm not much for parties, so I thought of you."

"I love you."

"Save it."

Nobody ever appreciates his heartfelt declarations of love.

-

Lynx declines Reyes' offer of the second ticket, so he's left with going by himself—sad and a waste of a second ticket—asking someone else in the port to be his date—not as easy and more dangerous than it sounds—or asking Scott. Reyes can't actually think of a drawback to that last one.

Scott's in Sara's room, reading something on a datapad while she sleeps. She does a lot of that when she's not lurking ominously in dark corners of the ship or messing with equipment. Scott usually follows her around when she decides to go for such jaunts, which is probably the only reason nothing on the ship's blown up yet.

Reyes pulls the door shut behind him—it's become a lot heavier since Crux and Lynx added the shielding, and the hydraulics aren't strong enough to close it faster than at a snail's pace—and becomes acutely aware of how close they all are to each other. Scott's sitting on the floor in front of Sara's bed, putting him and Reyes face to face with each other.

"Something wrong?" Scott asks, looking up from his datapad.

"I've got two tickets to Sloane's party." Reyes brings them up on his omni-tool. "Care to be my plus one?"

"Just—just the two of us?"

Reyes pauses, wondering if he'd misspoken. "Yes, because there are only two tickets. And we'll probably run into Keema while we're there, but she never said to stay away, so I doubt it'll be a problem."

Scott looks up at Sara. "I can't—"

"We'll only be gone a few hours, and you can check in with Crux and Lynx at any time if you're worried. When's the last time you went to a party?"

"It's been a while."

"And it'll be a while again before you get another chance."

Scott looks up at Sara again. "Let me tell Sara."

-

It's early evening when they step off the ship, the brilliant orange and softer yellows and reds of the sunset sky perfectly illustrating why it's Reyes' favourite time of the day on Kadara.

"How long were you on Kadara?" Reyes asks as he and Scott wait for the tram that will take them from the docks into the heart of the port.

"Less than a day. I got here early to wait for Sara, then it was only a few hours after that when I overheard Derc selling passage to Elaaden."

"So I take it you've never left the docks?"

"No. Didn't really see much of the docks, either. I spent half the time convinced the Alliance would march into the port at any second, and the other half thinking what a waste of effort this would all be if I got stabbed to death before ever seeing Sara again."

"But you survived on both counts, to return another day and see that there's more to the port than just illegal trading and people who carry knives to get around the gun embargo." Reyes gestures at another commuter who's openly wearing what can only be described as a sword. If it doesn't shoot, it's legal, and it's probably just a matter of time before there's a revival of spears and battle-axes.

"How much more?"

"Not much, but you're six hundred years away from everything you've ever known, in a galaxy that won't welcome you, with an Initiative that won't stand up for you, and now you've chosen to walk your own path. But don't worry, you're not alone. Thousands have gone before you and forged new lives on the frontier, and now, so can you." Reyes makes a sweeping gesture with his arm. "It's a brave new world out here."

"That's the 'brave new world' speech, huh?" Scott asks.

"The others tell you about it?" Reyes lets his arm drop.

"They asked if I'd heard it yet, and I told them only the abridged version."

"Now you've heard it all. And in the perfect setting too, with Kadara Port at its best: early evening at the docks with all of the bustle and none of the rush, a beautiful sunset, no wind to blow in the sulphur from the Badlands, not a single corpse in sight…this is the part where I leave behind your back while you're basking in the beauty the best of the worst has to offer."

"You just leave? After all that talk about not being alone?"

"First lesson of the new world: keep your wits about you at all times. If you catch me leaving, I'll give you some advice. If not, you'll need to learn the hard way how to fend for yourself."

"That's a little harsh."

"That's how it is out here. And you would have failed, I suspect, but I won't be leaving today, because then I'd have no date to the party."

"Is this a date?" Scott asks with the smallest of smiles.

"It can be." The tram pulls into the station and Reyes offers his arm. "Shall we?"

-

Sloane's moved up from her days working out of the docks. Now she sits in the heart of Kadara Port proper, atop the tallest building on the tallest mountain as she lords over her people. Reyes won't say he agrees with her methods—protection fees are still very much a thing, and exile is exile even if the Badlands are a little more civilised than before—but he has loftier goals these days than toppling a tyrant queen from her hard-won throne. Well, maybe he had when he'd decided to leave Kadara and the life he'd had here behind, but his goals these days are mostly along the lines of 'don't run out of fuel' and 'don't fall out of the sky'.

They step off the tram and Scott immediately cranes his neck to look up the side of the Outcast headquarters, emblazoned with their logo and hung with banners that have inspirational sayings on them like 'KETT OUT OF HELEUS' and 'THE ALLIANCE CAN KISS OUR ALLI-ASS'. Sloane's probably hired some kind of PR manager, because Reyes doesn't remember her having a sense of humour.

"They really hate the Alliance here," Scott says as he finally tears his eyes away from the building, only for the wall of graffiti behind Reyes to catch his attention. Amongst the usual scrawled profanities and demands of the people—ranging from 'LOWER TAXES ON FUEL IMPORTS' to 'DEMOCRACY FOR KADARA'—are crude drawings of kett and Alliance soldiers being brutally murdered.

"Some of them for good reasons," Reyes says. He doesn't want to dwell on politics or the state of the universe right now, so he pulls Scott along into the Outcast headquarters.

The party is being held in a large room on the ground floor that's been draped in colourful fabrics and illuminated by strings of lights for the event. There's also a huge mechanical chandelier suspended over the middle of the room, made out of scrap metal and anchored at no fewer than a dozen points to the walls and ceiling. It's an ostentatious show of wealth and power if Reyes ever saw one. Scott, naturally, is entranced.

"What are you doing here?" Keema's sidled up to Reyes' other side while he was busy watching Scott watching the layers of the chandelier oscillate up and down. "And with _him_?"

"I happened to be offered two tickets to the party and I just couldn't turn them down, you know me."

"You just 'happened' upon two tickets?"

"Derc did, actually. You'll have to ask him for more details."

Keema lets out an exasperated sigh. "Fine, just don't cause any trouble. And for the love of all the stars in the sky, make sure that one doesn't give anyone his real name."

"I can handle him."

"Oh, Keema!" Scott finally realises they're not alone. "How did your—"

Reyes kicks him in the shin. "Not here," he hisses.

Keema shakes her head and leaves them for a group of angara gathered around a buffet table.

"Sorry," Scott whispers. "Do they"—he looks around the room—"not like the Resistance here?"

"It's complicated." Before the Initiative and the exiles, Kadara had been a haven for the outcasts from angaran society, those who'd turned their backs on civility, and, if Evfra's to be believed, the Resistance. "In general, it's unwise to broadcast your affiliations, no matter what they are or where you are." Reyes looks around the room at the banners and uniformed guards. "Unless you're an Outcast in Kadara Port, I suppose."

"Right." Scott's eyes dart nervously around the room before he checks the time on his omni-tool. "I should check in with Sara."

"Over here." Reyes pushes Scott behind a gold-embroidered curtain then also tucks himself into the narrow space formed by the curtain, the wall, and a pillar. He and Scott are so close together their chests are nearly touching.

"Uh, what are we doing?" Scott asks.

"Making sure we have a cover story in case someone comes looking for us. Make your call, but don't mention any names. Never know who might be listening in."

Reyes keeps an ear on the party while Scott calls Crux. She assures him that yes, Sara's eaten dinner, and no, she hasn't had any flashbacks or blackouts while he's been gone. Scott tries to ask more questions, but Crux quickly hangs up on him with some lame excuse about helping Lynx check on the boilers.

The orange glow from Scott's omni-tool cuts off, but the light that filters through the gaps in the curtain plays across Scott's face in technicolour. Reyes stares a little too long to plausibly be just looking at the light, and from the way Scott catches his gaze and holds it, he knows it too. Perhaps he's not so oblivious after all.

They are so very close together.

Reyes thinks about making a move, and Scott makes a small, aborted movement like he might be too, then the curtain is being pulled back, flooding their dark alcove with light.

"Reyes! I thought that was you I saw skulking about."

It takes Reyes' eyes a while to adjust to the sudden brightness, but he recognises the voice before he sees Zia, cutting a striking outline in a flowing black and red dress and balancing a delicate glass between her fingers. It's been years since Reyes has seen her, and he can't help but feel a little envious at how stunning she looks while he's here in the only clothes he has that doesn't make it look like he's just come out of a warzone.

"Well?" she says. "Aren't you going to introduce us?"

"This is Zia, my ex," Reyes tells Scott. "We broke up because she has no sense of personal boundaries." That's not true, but Reyes is feeling a little malicious at being so rudely interrupted, and by Zia of all people.

"We never broke up," Zia says. "You ghosted me one day nine years ago, then when we met again a year later, you acted like we'd never been together."

"Because we weren't together!"

"You just said she was your ex," Scott murmurs into Reyes' ear.

"Ex friends with benefits, and I'm being generous because we weren't even really friends." It had been a can't-believe-we're-not-dead one-night stand that had turned into a why-sleep-alone-when-you-can-sleep-together two-night stand, then a toothbrush-and-change-of-clothes-at-your-place however-many-night stand, but it certainly hadn't been a _relationship_.

Zia's giving him a look of barely-concealed contempt, but she quickly turns on Scott as easier prey. "And who's this sweet young thing you've convinced to come with you tonight?" She leans in with a predatory grin.

"Uh, Alec," Scott blurts out before Reyes can come up with anything. "Alec Harlow."

"Look, Alec, you seem like a nice boy who's a bit out of his depth, so let me give you some advice: men like Reyes are the boys your parents warned you to stay away from."

"And women like you are what the mean girls from high school vids aspire to be," Reyes says. "Bye, Zia."

He tugs Scott out onto the dance floor, which is a large square in the middle of the room devoid of furniture and packed with people dancing drunkenly and out of time to the mellow song that's playing. Reyes pulls Scott close to him and starts them swaying to the beat around the small circle of dance floor that's theirs.

"What kind of a name is 'Alec Harlow'?" Reyes asks.

"It's my father's first name and my mother's maiden name," Scott says.

"Great, no one's ever going to figure that out." A thought occurs to Reyes. "Isn't that your porn star name?"

"No, that's the name of your first pet and the street you grew up on."

"I can't believe you know that off the top of your head."

"Someone at the Academy told me, and it stuck with me because the name of my first pet was really stupid. You see, it was a hamster, and Sara—"

"I don't think I want to know."

The music fades out and a more upbeat song begins to play. The crowd surges as people shuffle on and off the dance floor, Scott and Reyes included.

"Can we go outside?" Scott says, his face a little flushed. "It's kind of warm in here."

"Sure, I think there's a balcony that way." Reyes points in the direction of what he thinks is the back door; the last time he'd been here, he'd been more interested in the guests than the architecture.

He snags two flutes of sparkling wine on their way out, Scott grabs two plates of snacks from the buffet table by the door, and they have themselves a picnic on the huge balcony that overlooks the lower districts. The shipyards and munitions factories have ceased work for the day, but this is the hour the rest of the port comes to life.

"Do you come to Kadara Port often?" Scott asks.

Reyes looks away from the cityscape lighting up against the darkening sky to find Scott watching him intently. "I used to live here before unification. Afterwards, when Sloane started cracking down on the chaos and trying instil some sense of order into this motley bunch of exiles and outlaws, it was more fun to be out there, dodging kett and Alliance." And it was harder to continue wallowing in doubt and self-pity when the shadow of what could have been wasn't lurking in every corner.

"Sounds exciting." Scott's eyes have taken on a faraway stare; in his head, he's no doubt romanticising a life of piracy.

"You said you grew up on the Nexus?" Reyes asks before he loses Scott completely.

"Yeah, Sara and I only came out of cryo after unification."

"What was that like? Waking up to find out the Initiative was under rule of the kett."

"That was less of a shock than finding out none of the golden worlds were, well, golden. Sara and I were only fourteen, and all we wanted out of the trip was to make a home planetside. The kett were…we were really sheltered from the extent of their influence on the Nexus. All we were told was that the kett were the only reason the Initiative had survived for as long as we did in Heleus, not that they had total control over the cluster and the Alliance."

"The last few months must have been hard for you."

"Yeah, just a bit. What about you, though? What did you do before all this?" Scott gestures broadly at the port.

"Well, way back when, I was in the Alliance."

"You were Alliance?"

"Systems Alliance, thank you very much." The choice of name for the Initiative's new military force had most certainly been deliberate. "Back in the good old Milky Way."

"Wish you were there now?"

"Not even a bit. Signed up as a shuttle pilot for the Initiative, got here, got fed up with following the same shit orders I'd been following a whole galaxy away, and thought I'd do better on my own. I may have a problem with authority," Reyes admits.

"You think?" Scott is smiling. "I'm surprised you're not captaining your own ship."

"Ah, Keema and I go way back. I can make an exception for her." She'd been the first friend Reyes had made in Andromeda when he hadn't even been looking for them. He doesn't delude himself into thinking Keema had approached him that afternoon in Kralla's Song with intentions of friendship, but they've come a long way in the last eight years.

Scott nods agreeably and looks over at Reyes' plate, his eyes searching for something.

"Take whatever you like." Reyes pushes his plate towards Scott.

"Oh, I just wanted to see if you had any of those fruit tarts left."

They'd been the very first thing Reyes had eaten; Sloane always boasts fresh fruit in all pastries served, and the difference is profound when you've been living off dried and frozen fruit for months. "Stay here, I'll hunt down some more for you."

"I can—"

"Stay. Take in the sights. I'll be back before you know it."

Reyes has an ulterior motive for going alone: he'd seen Velonia pass through the doors earlier, and it'll be easier to talk business with her without having to explain Scott's presence at his side.

He finds her perusing the dextro buffet table which is conveniently located close to the one loaded with levo pastries, and gradually moves closer to her as he piles different-flavoured fruit tarts onto his plate.

"I don't remember you having such a sweet tooth," Velonia says.

"Do you remember hauling a hundred cases of grenades through a geyser field?"

No fewer than half a dozen Outcast shuttles had been tailing them, and though they hadn't been shooting as they'd wanted to retrieve the cargo, a high-speed chase through unpredictable terrain with a shuttle loaded full of explosives made for a dangerous enough job already. Still, they'd managed to have fun.

Velonia chuckles. "Good times. What do you want today, Reyes?"

"Just to talk. Nothing too high-stakes." Reyes motions for Velonia to follow him to a less-frequented corner of the room. "Do you still run salvage from the Paradise?"

"I've just come from there, in fact. And I heard the most fascinating story about a Luciérnaga-class transport being chased off the planet by not only the Alliance, but also the kett."

"Wow, I wouldn't have wanted to be them."

There's an amused silence between them before Velonia asks, "What did you do?"

"The same old—stole something of theirs that they wanted back."

"Must have been valuable if the kett deigned to intervene."

"Must have."

They talk a little more, swapping news about Govorkam, Zaubray, and their neighbouring systems until Reyes hears what sounds like a gunshot coming from the balcony. There are no accompanying screams and the music in the hall is loud enough that he thinks he imagined it, but he's left Scott on his own for long enough, and excuses himself from Velonia's company.

Most of the partygoers on the balcony have congregated at the far end, including Scott, it seems, as only two empty plates and glasses on the railing mark the spot where he and Reyes had been standing. Intrigued and more than a little bit suspicious, Reyes pushes his way to the front of the dispersing crowd to find Scott standing across from a man who's on the ground clutching at a bleeding wound in his shoulder. The whole setup is reminiscent of a duel from one of those old school wild west vids that have enjoyed a resurgence of popularity amongst outlaws.

The duel appears to be over but Scott's still standing there, bearing uncanny resemblance to the proverbial deer caught in the headlights.

"Come on." Reyes tugs on Scott's wrist and pulls him away. As in the wild west vids, tempers tend to run high after duels regardless of the rules of engagement laid down beforehand.

"I leave for five minutes," Reyes hisses in Scott's ear as he guides him back inside with an iron grip around his bicep. "How did you manage to piss someone off so badly they challenged you to a duel?"

"I overheard a guard harassing one of the guests. It sounded like a personal argument, not a security issue or anything, but no one was stepping in to stop it, so I did. The guard thought I was trying to make a move on his…girlfriend? Ex? So he challenged me to a duel for her…affections. I wasn't going to do it, but she seemed pretty stoked by the idea, and it was either that or be arrested on the spot."

Reyes looks over his shoulder at where a group of guards have gathered, presumably to start their search for Scott. "Well, Defender of the Downtrodden, it's time we took our leave of this party."

Reyes is still holding the plate of fruit tarts he'd carried out to the balcony and back, but instead of leaving without them, he divides the pile into two and wraps each stack neatly with a napkin, shoving one into Scott's jacket pocket and one into his own.

Scott doesn't seem to have noticed, preoccupied as he is with looking over his shoulder, so Reyes puts his hand in the crook of Scott's elbow and gets them moving at the same pace as the others around them, keeping their movements as natural as he can as they cut through the dance floor.

The guards at the door pay them no mind, which suggests the guard Scott had tangled with is not eager to air his dirty laundry to the rest of his coworkers, and soon, they're out on the port in the balmy night air.

"Sorry I ruined the party for you," Scott says once they're out of earshot of the guards.

Reyes shrugs. "It was fairly mediocre anyway, as far as Sloane's get-togethers go." It wasn't, actually, and Reyes is disappointed they're not going to be able to stay, but what can he say, he has a soft spot for people who stand up to the Outcasts.

-

They ride the tram back to the docks in a companionable silence, but Reyes puts a hand on Scott's shoulder when he makes to head back for the ship.

"We don't have to go back yet, if you don't want to," Reyes says. He's loathe for this night to come to an end so soon, and there is entertainment to be had around the port that doesn't involve Sloane or her Outcasts.

Scott hesitates. "Let me check in with Sara first."

It's far enough of a walk to the ship that Scott contents himself with another call to Crux, who promises that nothing interesting has happened in his absence, and that Sara had even played a round of cards with her and Lynx before going to sleep.

"Thanks, Crux." Scott hangs up and turns back to Reyes. "Where are we going?"

Reyes hadn't had a place in mind when he'd proposed having their own night out, but looking around the port while Scott was making his call has given Reyes an idea. "You're not scared of heights, are you?"

Behind the marketplace just beyond the entrance to the docks is a maintenance shaft that leads down to the tunnels beneath the old Outcast headquarters, and a ladder that leads to the rooftops. The maintenance shaft is sealed with a grate that needs a code to be opened, but the ladder is only secured by a latch that holds the lower half out of easy reach.

"Give me a leg up," Reyes says, motioning at the latch.

"It says 'Authorised Personnel Only'." Scott points at the sign next to the ladder.

"So if anyone finds us, the ladder was down when we got here, and it was too dark to see the sign."

"It's under a light."

"Scott." Reyes resists the urge to put his hands on his hips. "I'll take full responsibility if anyone finds us, will that be satisfactory?"

Scott looks over his shoulder as if to check if anyone is waiting around the corner to hear him agree to committing this misdemeanour. "I…suppose."

"Excellent; never be afraid to live a little. Now, how about that boost?"

They climb to the roof together, and Reyes snags an unattended bottle of whiskey through an open window that they pass on their way up the fire escape behind a block of apartments. Scott is absolutely _scandalised_ when he finds out where the bottle in Reyes' hands has come from.

They can get higher than the apartment rooftop by jumping across to the next building, but Scott looks at the gap then down at the drop to the ground, and puts his foot down. They sit where they are, legs dangling over the edge of the roof.

There's not much of the port or the Badlands to look at from here, but away from the streetlights and the nightlife, the stars come out in full force.

Reyes fishes out the stash of fruit tarts from his pocket and gestures for Scott to do the same, basking in the look of absolute delight that crosses Scott's face when he unwraps the slightly crushed pastries.

"How did you—"

"Rule one: keep your wits about you at all times."

"Or people might slip fruit tarts into your pocket? That doesn't seem like such a bad thing." Scott shoves an entire one into his mouth and groans in satisfaction.

"That's no way to act in polite company."

"If we get any, I'll stop right away," Scott says through a mouthful of pastry.

"Ouch."

Scott devours another, then hesitates when he only has one left. "I should save it for Sara."

Reyes has only eaten one—his craving for sweet food is easily satisfied—and passes the other two to Scott. "I'd rather have the whiskey," he says when Scott tries to refuse.

"You stole that!" Scott says as Reyes cracks open the lid.

"I also stole the fruit tarts, but I don't hear you complaining about that." Or at least, party etiquette dictates that food from the buffet table is to be consumed while at the venue.

"That's different." Scott doesn't turn down the bottle when Reyes offers it to him, though. He takes a swig and passes the bottle back, but Reyes isn't expecting it, and they both lunge for the bottle as it slides out of Scott's hand.

Reyes catches it by the neck and Scott by the body, and they're so close to each other that Reyes can see the wet sheen the whiskey has left behind on Scott's slightly parted lips. A glance up at Scott's eyes reveals he's watching Reyes, as if waiting for him to make the next move. Reyes leans in even more, and Scott mimics the motion.

Not far away, heavy footsteps stomp up the fire escape.

"Someone's coming," Reyes whispers. They just can't seem to catch a break tonight. He pulls the bottle out of Scott's lax grip and recaps it, then pulls Scott to his feet and backs them up a few steps to give them enough space for a running start towards the gap Scott had been so reluctant to cross before. This time, Reyes jumps, and Scott follows.

An angry shout is directed at their backs as they go down the fire escape on the other side and into an alley where they press themselves against the wall and hold their breaths until they can be sure they weren't followed.

Scott is the first to break the silence, dissolving into breathless, exhilarated giggles that he tries to smother behind his hand.

"You are a terrible partner in crime," Reyes says even as he relishes the mirthful sparkle in Scott's eyes.

"I've never been in trouble before," Scott admits once he gets himself under control.

"I can tell." It's nothing short of a miracle that Scott managed to rescue Sara when petty thievery is enough to get him worked up, but that only proves how far he's willing to go for someone he loves, which is something Reyes understands and admires. "But the night is still young." Reyes throws an arm around Scott's shoulders. "We'll make a proper outlaw of you yet."

"I think that's enough excitement for one evening." Scott doesn't duck out from under Reyes' arm like he'd expected, but lets it lie as they walk.

The market at the docks is open twenty-four hours, and when they pass a stall selling trinkets and keepsakes for visitors to boast that they'd made it to the infamous Kadara Port, Reyes makes Scott wait on the other side of the footpath while he makes a purchase. Reyes returns with a small metal pin depicting the Kadara Port skyline, subtle enough that Scott can claim ignorance if searched by the Alliance, and fastens it to the inside of Scott's jacket.

"There, something to remember our night in the port by once the fruit tarts are long gone."

"You didn't have to," Scott says with a smile as he puts a hand over his jacket where the pin is.

"I wanted to." Reyes offers Scott his arm this time, and Scott loops his own arm through.

They lean into each other like they're too drunk to stand upright alone even though neither of them have had that much to drink, and for no fathomable reason, Scott breaks into another round of quiet giggles that also sets Reyes off.

When they stumble back onto the ship still giddy and breathless, there's no one to bear witness save for Lynx, working on the a-grav systems in the floor of the cargo bay. She looks up as they pass her by, and shakes her head in fond exasperation. Scott doesn't even seem to notice she's there, but Reyes gives her a small wave.

The next morning, when they see Keema at breakfast and she asks if they got kicked out of the party, Reyes tells her, "We found a better place to be," and it's not even a lie.


	5. The Dark of Space

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A birthday party turns into a life-and-death situation.

After dinner, Reyes brings out the small cake he's hidden at the back of the fridge behind the carton of long-life nutrient paste that not even Keema will touch until they're truly out of other options. He doesn't bring the cake to the table yet, but positions it on the counter behind the toaster to hide it from view.

"Scott, Sara," he says gravely, "I'm afraid I have some bad news for you."

Scott immediately turns around in alarm. Sara's slower to respond, merely looking over her shoulder as if it's too much of an imposition for her to give Reyes her full attention.

"The Alliance has issued a warrant for your arrest. Both of you are now officially fugitives in the eyes of the law."

It's not exactly surprising news even if it's more official now than before, which is probably why Sara's giving Reyes an unimpressed look for wasting her time.

"But there's also good news!" Reyes continues in a much more chipper tone. "The warrants had your birth dates right there under your names, and after converting from Milky Way to Andromeda time, that day is today!" He lights the candles and lifts up the cake, bringing it over to the table as everyone claps. Keema had found the warrants and the cake had been Reyes' idea, but everyone had been receptive to having a small celebration.

"You shouldn't have," Scott says as he beams from ear to ear. "I didn't even realise it was today."

"Happy twenty second, I believe," Reyes says, returning to his seat.

"That's right."

Sara's eyeing the cake suspiciously and doesn't move, so Scott leans in to blow out the candles by himself. Just as the flames go out, so does all power on the ship, just for a second.

Reyes is on his feet before the lights come back on, because a power surge when they're in the middle of nowhere, light years from the nearest system, is a big deal no matter how brief.

"That wasn't me, was it?" Scott asks.

"I'm going to check on the engine," Reyes says, already heading for the door. "Get started on that cake, I'll be back in a minute."

"I'll check the bridge," Derc says.

"Who's got a clean knife?" Reyes hears Scott say behind him.

He stops in the doorway with one foot in the hall and turns around to point out the knife he'd left on the counter when he'd brought over the cake. Scott looks up to see where Reyes is pointing, as do a few of the others, but none of them are out of their seats before an explosion rocks the ship. Reyes stumbles, catches himself on the doorway, sees a fireball streaking down the corridor towards him, then something slams into him and he falls to the floor.

The shockwave from the explosion blows through the galley, and Reyes feels the heat from the fireball wash over him before another shockwave, this time from inside the galley, forces the fire out, and the door to the galley slides shut.

Reyes rolls to his feet and takes stock of the room: Keema's standing at the door controls, Crux and Nakamoto are emerging from under the table and Lynx from the pantry area, Sara's standing up, facing the door to the engine room, and Scott's sprawled across the floor not far from Reyes. Cutlery and food are strewn everywhere, there are scorch marks on the end of the table closest to the door, and only the emergency lighting is on.

"Derc, seal off everything that leads to the lower decks and open the cargo bay doors," Keema says, already striding towards the bridge. "I want this fire off my ship."

Reyes would help, only Scott hasn't gotten up yet, and Reyes is fairly certain Scott's the one who'd pushed him out of the way of the oncoming fire, so he takes a minute to crouch down next to Scott and shake his shoulder. "Scott," Reyes says. "Hey."

Scott doesn't respond, doesn't open his eyes, and Reyes blindly gropes for a pulse. He manages to determine Scott does have one before Nakamoto is pushing him out of the way and Crux is bringing the small first aid kit they keep in one of the overhead cupboards. How much that'll help, Reyes doesn't know, but he can't just stand around and watch.

"Did either of you see what happened?" Reyes asks Sara and Lynx.

"Fire," Sara says, eerily calm.

"Yes, I think we all saw that."

"I didn't know you were a biotic," Lynx says to Sara.

"You—someone stopped the fire from coming in." Reyes looks between the two of them. "I thought it was Lynx." She and Keema are the only biotics on their crew, which is a shame because mid-flight repairs to the exterior of the ship are so much easier when you can move things with your mind.

"Not me, that shockwave handed my ass to me."

"Scott said I was, but I'd forgotten how to until now." Sara looks down at her hands, which crackle slightly with blue energy for a moment before fading away.

At the mention of Scott, Reyes turns to Nakamoto. "How is he?"

"A few minor external injuries, but the worst of it could be internal. We need to get him to the medbay," Nakamoto says.

Reyes comms the bridge. "Is the fire gone?"

"It's gone," Keema replies, "but we have bigger problems. I need you—"

"In a minute." Reyes hits the door release and helps Lynx carry Scott down to the medbay while Nakamoto and Crux go ahead to get things ready. The walls and stairwell are black with soot, and there's the lingering smell of smoke in the air, but they're all of secondary concern to Reyes right now.

Scott lies unmoving on the bed as Nakamoto hooks him up to machines to monitor his vitals and run diagnostic scans. Sara watches intently from the other side of the window, hands and face pressed against the glass as she stares at her brother, unable to bring herself to step inside the medbay.

"What's going on?" Reyes asks. "Why isn't he waking up?"

"He will, in time." Nakamoto is running his omni-tool's scanner over Scott. "I'm more worried about his lungs. He caught the majority of the blast to his torso, and though he only has a few broken ribs, if he has too much bruising on his lungs, he won't be getting enough oxygen." Nakamoto looks up. "His vitals are holding steady for now, so why don't you let me do my job while you do yours?"

Reyes lets out his breath in a long exhale. Right. The fire had originated in the engine room.

-

Keema's waiting in the lounge, as is Derc, which doesn't bode well for the ship.

"She's not moving, huh?" Reyes says. He can hear the silence behind the walls where there would usually be the hum of the drive core at work and the rush of water through the pipes.

"It's not good," Derc says. "The engines aren't responding, life support is running off the batteries, and we've got fire damage from the engine room all down to the cargo bay where we vented the oxygen."

Keema follows Reyes up to the engine room and watches as he inspects the drive core—singed but still in working order—then goes down to engineering where the actual engines are housed. The starboard engine is currently powered down and could probably be persuaded to work again, but the port engine had clearly been the source of the fire and subsequent explosion.

Reyes sees the part to blame almost immediately. "Damn it."

"What is it?" Keema comes to look over his shoulder.

"Catalyser on the bloody compression coil." Reyes pulls out the ruined catalyser from the guts of the engine and sits down heavily on the floor. "I meant to replace the whole thing the last time we were on Kadara, but then the trade fell through, there was that whole business with the Alliance, and then when we finally had enough money, I went and got distracted by that stupid party Sloane was throwing." Reyes bangs the back of his head against the engine. "I thought, well, it's lasted this long, what's a little trip to Voeld, right?" Reyes laughs bitterly. He should have known better; _Defiance_ should always be his first priority, and she'd been telling him for weeks that her compression coil was no good anymore.

"Focus," Keema says. "How do we fix it?"

"Can't." Reyes throws the catalyser away, and it comes to a stop under the engine. "Not the port engine, anyway. I'm going to get power restored first so we can get some lights on and air flowing in here."

When _Defiance_ is close enough to a star, solar panels atop her roof and along the sides of her hull generate enough energy to power all the appliances on the ship. When she's between systems, a generator takes over, and it should be able to run for as long as it's fed a steady stream of fuel, which shouldn't be a problem since they'd left Kadara Port with full fuel tanks.

Except the fuels lines connecting the engines and tanks had been damaged in the explosion, then the tanks themselves had blown in the fire. Keema and Derc had done a good job of venting the fire quickly, but not quickly enough to prevent it from eating up most of their fuel and oxygen on its way out.

"That doesn't look so good from here," Keema says from the door in the bulkhead separating the fuel tanks from the engine room that's supposed to prevent exactly this type of scenario from happening.

"It's not looking so good from here either," Reyes says. The damaged fuel lines had acted as a conduit for the fire, allowing it to travel through the walls and completely bypass the fireproof bulkhead. "I can probably scrape together enough fuel to power the generator for a few days, maybe a week or two if we keep everything in low power mode and just keep drifting until someone stumbles upon us. Or, we can use the fuel for our one good engine and hope it gets us to the nearest system before we run out of air. Either way, I'll need to fix that starboard engine. Talk to Derc about the calculations and see which odds you like better."

"What about the batteries? How long will they last?"

Reyes tries to think back to what the merchant had said when he'd first installed them over five years ago. "Twenty-four hours, supposedly. With no climate control or hot water, and the lights kept in emergency mode. Longer if we can seal off parts of the ship and turn off life support there, but I don't know if that's possible."

"I'll tell the crew to dress warmly."

Even moving about as he sets the starboard engine to rights, Reyes feels the cold start to set in at the end of the first hour after the explosion. His fingers are starting to get stiff, and he drops a wrench and has to crawl under the engine to retrieve it. When he comes out the other side, Keema's standing there, holding out a jacket she must have taken from his quarters.

"Thanks." Reyes pulls the jacket on and blows warm air onto his hands. He wishes he could put some gloves on, but all he's got for working are welder's gloves, which are far too unwieldy for fine repairs, and he's not yet desperate enough to ruin the leather gloves he has in his quarters. "How are we looking?"

"I've asked Derc to start broadcasting a coded transmission requesting help from any Resistance ships in the area. If we're not that lucky, I'll put it to a vote whether we start broadcasting a distress signal."

The two groups most likely to respond to a distress signal are raiders and Alliance, neither of whom they want to run into unless there's no other option.

"Have you told them about our timeline?"

"Yes, and for now, they've agreed to wait until the twelve hour mark. But if we rescue ourselves in the meantime, even better."

"I'll have the engine in working order soon. Are we going to be using it?"

"Derc's still running the numbers, but they're not looking so good to me."

"Any system will do," Reyes says. "All we need is a little sun, then we can drift until our food runs out."

 _Defiance_ boasts a sophisticated water recycler with over ninety percent efficiency, but tech for recycling solids back into food doesn't exist yet. Well, surely someone's come up with the idea, but Reyes doubts many people would be keen to try the results.

He finishes fixing the starboard engine after another half hour, then goes by the infirmary to check on Scott.

It's just Nakamoto and Sara inside now, the latter having made it to the other bed—the furthest she can get from the medical instruments while still being in the medbay—where she sits cross-legged with the scrambler someone's thought to put by her side, chewing her nails as she watches Scott intently. Nakamoto is sitting at the console in the corner looking at a screen full of graphs and tables.

"How is he?" Reyes asks.

"We had a bit of a scare earlier, but he's stable now," Nakamoto says. "In fact, if he stays this way, he'll likely outlive us all."

"How so?" Scott looks still and pale as death.

"He's using less oxygen for one, and we've also plugged in an electric blanket to keep his core temperature up. The rest of us will likely freeze to death not long from now."

"I'll talk to Keema about getting some heat turned on."

Reyes wants nothing more than to sit by Scott's side and hold his hand until he wakes up, but instead, his feet take him back to the upper deck and to the bridge, where the rest of the crew are gathered, silent and lost in thought.

"This is not exactly what I'd hoped to see," Reyes says. "What's gone wrong now?"

"It's not enough fuel," Keema says.

"Not even for one measly jump? Surely we're halfway to Vaar or Joba from here."

"It's not enough," Derc says. "With only one engine we'll have to constantly correct our course so we're not flying in circles, which will take nearly twice as much fuel. Not to mention, we'll run out of battery power long before we get anywhere near a sun."

"Nakamoto says we'll probably freeze to death first."

"He told me too," Keema says. "We'll turn on some heat in the infirmary and on the bridge. Just enough to keep things above freezing."

"That's still going to shave off about four hours from the life support," Derc says.

"Turn on the generator. We're waiting it out."

Reyes goes back to the engine room while the others clean up the mess and the damage from the explosion and fire. He means to organise the wreckage that is the port engine so that if—when—they get to a port, it'll be easier to pull out the whole thing, but once he drops through the hatch, all he can do is stare despondently at the engine.

This is the eighth year since leaving Kadara Port for the dark of space in the only ship he'd been able to afford at the time, barely able to hold itself together long enough to make the jump to FTL. But it had held, and Reyes had returned victorious from their maiden voyage to the port where a skeptical Keema had been waiting. He'd christened the ship _Defiance_ to her derision, scraped together a crew, and off they'd gone, to start their lives anew in the galaxy of fresh starts.

-

"Reyes." Keema's hand falls on his shoulder, and Reyes jumps. "If there's nothing left to be fixed, there's no use in you being here. Come up to the bridge before you freeze."

"What time is it?" Reyes' eyelids feel heavy, but that could just be the hypothermia setting in.

"Late enough that most of the ship is usually asleep at this hour. There's no heat in the rooms, but there are blankets and floor space on the bridge."

Reyes yawns and rubs his eyes. "I'm going to check on Scott first."

"Did something happen between you two?" Keema asks as she follows Reyes out of the engine room.

"What do you mean?"

"Something's changed between you since we left Kadara."

"We spent some time together in the port after leaving Sloane's party," Reyes says. "Nothing came of it." Something almost did, but perhaps it was for the best they were interrupted and had a friendly night out instead of something more intimate.

"You should have seen him leap out of his chair after the explosion. I didn't even think him capable of moving that quickly."

"That doesn't mean anything." Scott is brave and selfless and would have done the same for anyone else, Reyes is sure.

"Please, Reyes. That boy hasn't been able to take his eyes off you since he first saw you sweaty and half naked and hanging off the side of the ship in Kadara Port."

"That's—" Reyes tries to think back to the exact events of that day. "I distinctly remember being fully clothed that day." He had pulled off the upper half of his overalls when he'd gotten too warm, but he'd been wearing a shirt underneath, and that had definitely stayed on.

"I know you humans love seeing each other in varying states of undress. Whatever you were doing that day seemed to have done it for him."

"We can—now's not the time to talk about this." Not with Scott lying comatose in the medbay and the very real threat of death by suffocation, hypothermia, or starvation looming over them.

"Very well. If you decide to sleep in the medbay tonight, I promise I won't tell the others why."

Reyes shoves Keema off the landing, and she gives him a smug grin as he goes to the medbay and she to the bridge.

The temperature in the medbay is probably lower than what most people would call comfortable, but compared to the frigidness of the rest of the ship, it's positively warm inside.

"Where have you been?" Nakamoto narrows his eyes at Reyes. "Not sitting around in the cold, I hope."

"Not sitting, no." Reyes catches the blanket Nakamoto throws at him and sits down on a stool. The bed not occupied by Scott has a sleeping Sara in it, and Reyes doesn't think she'd be conducive to the idea of sharing. "How's he been?"

"Stable. I doubt there'll be any changes until he wakes up."

"When will that be?"

"Whenever he wakes up."

They could be in for a long wait, then.

"What are you doing here?" Nakamoto asks after a few minutes of silence.

"It was getting too cosy on the bridge." There's probably more room on the bridge than in here, especially taking into consideration the avionics bay behind the consoles, but Nakamoto doesn't need to know that. Reyes doesn't even think he's ever been up to the bridge.

"Fine, just be quiet about it. I'm going to get some sleep."

Nakamoto opts for sleeping upright in his chair leaning against a cupboard, but Reyes would prefer to be horizontal for a few hours. Before he tries making himself comfortable on the floor though, he watches Scott for a while.

There's an oxygen mask over his face and he's hooked up to an IV and three different monitors showing the same graphs Nakamoto had been looking at before—or maybe different ones, it's not like Reyes knows what they're for—one of them emitting a soft beep every few seconds. Scott looks like he's just sleeping, but then, so do some dead people.

-

Reyes is awoken by the doors to the medbay sliding open. He jerks upright and finds that he'd fallen asleep slumped over Scott's bed, not on the floor like he'd intended.

Keema steps into the medbay, and though her eyes linger on Reyes for a moment longer than they do on anything else, she doesn't comment on his sleeping arrangement, and her solemn expression doesn't change.

"I want you all off the ship," she says.

Reyes is fully awake in an instant. "Something wrong?"

"Cargo bay's not airtight anymore after the fire tore through it. Some of the sensors were destroyed too, so we've been unknowingly leaking air since yesterday."

"But we can seal it back up again, right?" Reyes pushes past Keema and goes out to the cargo bay. He's glad he still has the blanket wrapped around his shoulders because it's freezing in the hallway, and even colder in the cargo bay.

Crux, Lynx, and Derc are already there, wrapped in enough layers to weather Voeld, and applying sealant to the edges of every hatch and door.

"Our previous timeline has been halved," Keema tells Reyes. "We're not going to survive much longer running like this, so I want you all on the shuttles. Split the remaining fuel from the ship between you, it'll be enough to get you to Joba where you can send out a distress signal. Even being picked up by the Alliance will be better than staying here."

"No way," Reyes says. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Don't argue, it's already been decided."

"You should have woken me up. Or don't I get a say on this ship anymore?"

"You were already outnumbered." Keema starts up the stairs to the galley and motions for Reyes to follow.

"If anyone's going down with this ship, it's me," Reyes says once they're alone. He's always thought that's how he would go, though his imaginary scenarios had been much more dramatic than drifting through space slowly freezing to death. Maybe he would manage to lure an Alliance ship or two and blow _Defiance_ when they came into range as a final act of, well, defiance. That seems an aptly glorious end.

"No," Keema says, firmly but gently. "I can survive the cold better than anyone else here, and with the rest of you gone, the oxygen left should be able to last me a few days. Besides, they'll need you."

Keema makes a good point about the cold, but, "I'm sure the crew would rather have you leading them than me." Technically, Crux is second in line for the leadership, but the crew know this began as a Reyes-and-Keema venture, and he doubts anyone would challenge him if he stepped up.

"Not them, the Collective."

Now there's a name Reyes hasn't heard in years. "The Collec—screw the Collective. That was a dream nearly eight years gone now, from when the biggest problems we had were tax rates and protection fees."

"It was the start of something great," Keema says. "People really believed you could give them a better life."

"Like I said, smaller problems from a simpler life. And if you recall, at the first sign of real trouble, we gave up."

"No, you made a tactical decision to concede the port to Sloane. And it was a good decision."

They haven't talked about it since it happened, but Keema had been vehemently against disbanding at the time, adamant that unification had been their chance to encourage mass recruitment of neutral parties to their side, and to take the port from the Outcasts. However, Reyes had been equally stubborn in retaining the Collective's original goal of peace, which wasn't a feasible method of dealing with the kett and the newly-formed Alliance. They needed war, and Kadara already had a leader well versed in it.

"Maybe, but it was a blow for anyone expecting better from us. Think they'll be so eager to take up arms in the Collective's name again?"

"They already are. All those people pretending to the Charlatan? They didn't go away after you ordered the Collective to disband. Of course, they don't have the full reach of our network, so it's mostly just small pockets of outlaws working independently."

"Great, so _you_ go out there and reform the Collective, and _I'll_ stay here with my ship."

Reyes makes for the bridge, but Keema stops him with a hand on his chest.

"Reyes, it's done," she says. "I'll use what power's left in the batteries to broadcast a distress signal. Someone will come. And when they do, I'll call you back."

There's so much room for things to wrong, but Reyes makes the mistake of looking into Keema's eyes and seeing the hope, despair, resignation, and steely determination he feels within himself reflected back.

"I'll see you later," Keema says with conviction.

There's nothing left for Reyes to do but agree. "This isn't goodbye."

Keema nods, and they go their separate ways.

-

Sara won't leave her brother and Nakamoto won't leave his patient but neither of them can fly a shuttle, so the job falls to Reyes.

There's no need for him to remain in the pilot's chair the whole way to the Joba system as the shuttle only has a rudimentary QEC that can transmit or receive a single 'on' signal from _Defiance_ or the other shuttle, but Reyes can't bring himself to go into the back and face Sara's blank stare, Nakamoto's carefully crafted air of apathy, or Scott's unmoving form.

Instead, he stares out the window at the warped view of space as the shuttle rushes past stars faster than their light can reach it, and tries not to think of Keema and _Defiance_ alone in the dark.

The uncomfortable night’s sleep eventually catches up to him and he falls asleep at the controls, waking up a few hours later to Nakamoto sleeping in the co-pilot’s chair. A quick check of the shuttle’s systems reveals nothing went wrong during Reyes' extended lapse in attention, and that it’s only been two hours since they’d launched from _Defiance_.

Sara’s awake and staring at Scott when Reyes goes to the back of the shuttle.

“Any change?” Reyes asks as he sits down on one of the folding seats on the other side of the cramped space.

“I’ve seen dead people before,” Sara says. “They looked a lot like this.”

“On Eos?” Scott hasn’t mentioned Sara remembering more of the events leading up to her capture, but Reyes can’t think of anywhere else she would have seen a corpse.

Sara shrugs. “A desert. Bodies all around. No survivors.”

“Except you?”

Sara shrugs again. The look on her face says she clearly doesn’t count herself among the survivors.

They sit in silence until a blue glow fills the shuttle and Reyes looks up from the floor in alarm. Sara sees him watching and lets her biotics fade away.

“I wish I could do something,” she says, hands hovering over Scott.

“Me too,” Reyes says.

At three hours since launch, Nakamoto wakes up, and they break out the rations.

At four hours, Reyes gets up and goes to the cockpit to 'check on things' for the tenth time that hour.

At five hours, he's so bored he's reading medical texts over Nakamoto's shoulder on the datapad he's brought; Reyes had been so busy preparing for what they might find at the end of their journey that he hadn't thought about what to do while they were getting there.

At six hours, he wonders if they'll save more oxygen by sleeping the rest of the way, but he's glad he doesn't try putting it into practice because at six hours and ten minutes, Scott wakes up.

"Where are we?" he says in a faint voice that has Reyes and Nakamoto looking up from an incredibly tedious article about attempts to cure something called cerebral amyloid angiopathy.

Sara's the closest as she's sitting at the end of Scott's bed, but she only continues staring, her eyes widening fractionally as if she's seeing the living dead arise.

Reyes is the first to reach Scott, but before he can start explaining, Nakamoto pushes him out of the way and runs through a series of questions about how Scott feels and what he remembers, which is probably a better place to start.

"—explosion, and then—" Scott looks around the shuttle. "Where are the others?"

"We evacuated," Reyes says. "Derc, Crux, and Lynx are in the other shuttle."

Scott considers this news for a moment. "What about Keema?"

"She stayed behind."

"What for?"

"The ship wasn't going to support all of us for much longer, so she sent us off and stayed so there would be someone on board if anyone responded to the distress signal."

Scott doesn't need to ask what will happen if no one does. "Couldn't you have just turned off the distress signal and she could have come with us? Or we could have all waited in the shuttles."

"I know you don't get out much, Scott, but space is big. _Really_ big. The odds of anyone stumbling within range of our distress signal in time is…low. Especially out here, between systems. I wanted to use the last of our fuel to get _Defiance_ to the nearest system and wait there, but we didn't have enough, so our best chance at survival was to separate into three groups and hope at least one can send help to the others."

"You really agreed to this?"

"Yes."

"You? Really?" Scott's still heavily medicated so he probably isn't making the face he's hoping for right now, but the incredulity still comes across clearly.

"What do you know about me?" Reyes snaps. He can make himself feel bad enough about leaving Keema behind without Scott's help.

"Now's hardly the time to fight," Nakamoto says. "You'll use up all the oxygen."

Reyes immediately cools at the reminder. He takes a few breaths, not too deep, then says, "She didn't even ask me. The rest of the crew voted to split up, and that was that."

"I don't recall getting a vote," Nakamoto mutters.

"We still would have been outnumbered," Reyes points out.

"Who says I would have voted to stay?"

"Well, nobody asked me either," Scott says.

"I'll hear you out now," Reyes says, "not that it'll matter."

Scott takes a minute to consider his position. "I think you shouldn't leave your friends behind, whatever the reason."

"Naïve and wholly impractical, but I like it."

"What about you, Sara?" Scott looks down his bed with some difficulty.

"I don't want to die in space," Sara says without much inflection so that it sounds like the possibility is just a mild inconvenience to her.

"Technically, planets are in space, so—" Scott cuts himself off at the ferocious glare Sara gives him.

Reyes offers Scott's attempt at lightening the mood a half-hearted smile. "It wouldn't do anyone any good to turn back now."

"Isn't this sector full of outlaws? Someone must have picked up the distress signal by now."

"According to the Alliance, every sector is full of outlaws," Nakamoto says.

"They're not wrong," Reyes says.

"But this one does have a higher-than-average concentration of them."

"If they find _Defiance_ , Keema's going to need help," Scott says.

He looks at Reyes, who looks at Nakamoto, who looks back at Reyes.

It's a long shot, but at six hours and thirty-five minutes since launch, Reyes turns the shuttle around.

-

He's tempted to gun the engines to get them back faster, but they'll need the fuel later if they have to leave _Defiance_. How far they'll be able to get with five people in the shuttle and half as much fuel as recommended to get them to Joba, Reyes doesn't know, but if the other shuttle has arrived before them and managed to find help, they might still stand a chance.

Just over six hours later, they find _Defiance_ drifting along the same course they'd left her on, looking no worse for the wear. No better, either: the shuttle's limited scanning abilities reveals she's still running in low-power mode and still broadcasting the distress signal, so Reyes doesn't dare get his hopes up.

The shuttle's external oxygen sensor tells Reyes there are still breathable amounts of oxygen in the cargo bay, which means Keema hasn't needed to draw it up to the bridge from other parts of the ship yet, or…something worse that Reyes doesn't want to think about as he prepares to step into the airlock.

The ship-side doors open into darkness, which Reyes had expected, but instead of heading straight to the bridge, out of habit, he first casts the light from his omni-tool around and sees three things of interest: first, the fuel tanks sitting just inside the cargo bay doors that hadn't been there before; second, the pool of blood gathering along the bottom of the door frame; and third, the trail of bloody footprints leading towards the medbay. Angaran footprints.

"Hey, get out here!" Reyes shouts over his shoulder as he hits the release for the shuttle-side doors of the airlock.

He doesn't wait for the others to follow before he's taking the stairs down as fast as he can. He pauses at the bottom to scan the rest of the cargo bay for signs that an ambush is lying in wait, but there's no one around.

He follows the blood trail to the medbay—they go in then out, and the medbay is a mess and covered in bloodied handprints that's bound to have Nakamoto complaining about it for days, but they're angaran handprints and Reyes doesn't know whether he feels hope or dread at this discovery—and up the stairs, through the galley, and into the fore corridor where there's a figure slumped over at the bottom of the few steps up to the bridge. It's Keema, Reyes knows without needing to get closer.

He should though, to check her pulse and see if the crew are still in possession of their captain, but he can't bring himself to move forward until Nakamoto pushes past him carrying a bloodstained first aid kit from the medbay.

"How is she?" Reyes asks, remaining where he is.

"Still alive, but her pulse is weak. We need to get her down to the medbay."

Reyes forces his feet to move, and helps Nakamoto pick up Keema without really looking at her. They've gotten into their fair share of scrapes together, but Keema's more the sort to hang back and assess the situation while Reyes is the one who charges headlong into trouble. The only times he's ever seen her lying on a bed in the medbay is when he's across the room in the other one.

The extent of Reyes' medical knowledge is 'apply medi-gel to the affected area', so there's little he can do except hover anxiously in the medbay while Nakamoto tries to bring Keema back from the brink of death.

"What happened to her?" he asks as Nakamoto carefully peels off the blood-soaked dressing Keema had probably applied herself.

"Looks like a gunshot wound to the abdomen," Nakamoto says. "Bring back the equipment we took to the shuttle."

By the time Reyes gets to the shuttle and back—Scott and Sara aren't there anymore, but they're the least of his concerns right now—Nakamoto has set up an IV and is tucking a blanket around Keema.

"She managed to get the bullet wound closed with medi-gel, but at that point she'd already lost quite a lot of blood," Nakamoto explains as he and Reyes restore the monitoring equipment from the shuttle back to their usual spots. “Without any blood in storage or someone on hand for a transfusion, this is the best we can do.”

"What are the odds like?”

"Not bad.” That’s all Nakamoto will say about it. "Don't you have anything better to do?" he asks when Reyes stands there watching him adjust the settings on the machines.

"I might." Reyes needs to check that those were in fact barrels of fuel in the cargo bay, confirm it'll be enough to get them to Joba and that the starboard engine is still in working condition, then make the jump himself.

"Then go do that. I’ll let you know if Keema wakes up.”

Reyes takes one last look at her, then nods and goes to do exactly what he'd planned.

He adds some fuel to the generator so they can have the heat turned back on again in the bridge and medbay, reruns Derc's calculations still left in the ship's computer to be absolutely certain they'll have enough fuel, then gradually brings the starboard engine up to speed and engages the drive core.

What's usually a fifteen hour flight with two functioning engines is now twenty hours with one, and Reyes has to fire it up every few hours to correct their course.

He sets an alarm on his omni-tool so he doesn’t have to stay on the bridge the whole twenty hours, but the only other habitable place is the medbay, and if he goes there, he’ll just spend the whole time worrying about Keema.

Not that he can’t do it from here, but it’s a whole other thing actually seeing her. Worse than seeing Scott lying in that bed, because Keema's his oldest friend in Andromeda, and though this isn’t exactly what he’d expected when he'd signed up to cross dark space over six hundred years ago, it’s everything he’s ever needed, from living a life free of expectations to being perpetually short on credits.

"Hey." Scott's voice cuts through Reyes' thoughts.

Just an hour ago, Reyes would have been overjoyed just to see Scott walking around. Now, he can't even muster up the will to turn the chair around and see what Scott wants.

Scott lingers unspeaking in the doorway for long enough that Reyes would think he'd left if his image hadn't been reflected in one of the darkened monitors. Finally, he steps through onto the bridge and puts a hand on Reyes' shoulder. "She's gonna pull through."

"She will," Reyes says, like speaking the words out loud will make them come true. He looks up at Scott. "Sit with me?"

Scott nods and takes the co-pilot's chair.

"Keema says I have you to thank for pushing me out of the way of the fireball," Reyes says after a few minutes in which neither of them makes a sound.

"I suppose. I just saw it coming, and I had to do something."

"Why risk your life for a near stranger?"

"Why did you invite me to the party?" Scott counters.

"Nobody else wanted to go. You were literally my last choice." Reyes' default mode is snarky, and the words come out before he can stop himself.

"Oh." Scott looks taken aback. "Thanks for telling me."

"But I did—" Reyes says as Scott makes to get up, "I do—I wish we'd gotten a moment longer. At the party. On that rooftop. A second more. Two, even."

Scott sits back down. "A minute?"

"An hour?" Reyes suggests.

"Two, even," Scott echoes with the beginnings of a smile.

They've got about twenty to spare right now, alone on the bridge with nothing to do, but Reyes is exhausted in every way possible and doesn't want to start something he can't finish. "I'll take you somewhere nicer than Kadara Port next time," he says. "Maybe somewhere with less knives."

"Somewhere with less stealing?"

"I can't promise that."

Scott laughs, and despite the fact that the bridge is only just above freezing and there's still no word from Nakamoto on Keema, Reyes feels a warmth wash over him. He settles back in his chair, sees Scott do the same, and the two of them sit in companionable silence as _Defiance_ speeds through the dark of space.


	6. The Resistance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Defiance_ finally makes it to Voeld.

Two hours from Joba, Keema's eyes start to flutter open, and Reyes is by her side in a second. He's been waiting in the medbay in between trips to the bridge to check their flight path ever since Nakamoto reported she'd appeared to respond to his voice six hours ago.

"Hey," Reyes says when Keema's eyes find his. "We're going to have matching gunshot scars. I'll show you mine if you show me yours?"

"Keep your clothes on," Keema says as Reyes goes to lift the hem of his shirt. She blinks several times, slowly. "What are you doing here? I didn't call you back."

"Ah, but you were about to, weren't you? We found you in the hallway just outside the bridge."

"Just thought I'd sit in the pilot's chair while Derc wasn't around." Keema's words are slurred and her eyes are starting to close again, but just this brief exchange is enough for Reyes' worries to be eased.

"You must have a hell of a story to tell us, but I'll let you rest some more first."

"Did you…" Keema's eyes shut completely and Reyes thinks she's fallen asleep, but then she continues talking. "Did you fix the ship?"

"No, but you got us enough fuel to reach Joba. And our solar panels still work, so we can at least recharge the batteries while we wait for spare parts to fall into our hands."

"And the others?"

"We got here too late to call them back, so odds are, they're still on their way to Joba. I've set _Defiance_ 's coordinates for the same navpoint; let's see if we can beat them there."

"Stupid," Keema says, "of you to come back." Her left hand inches across the bed until it finds Reyes', fingers curling slightly to hold on to him.

Reyes takes her hand in both of his. "Sure was."

He sits with Keema long after she falls asleep, until his alarm goes off to remind him to check their course. They're less than forty minutes from arrival now, so Reyes stays on the bridge the whole time, reviewing the checklists he's made for the different situations they might find themselves in once they drop out of FTL. There's one for if the shuttle has beat them, another for if they haven't, one for if there are any ships or stations on the long range scanner, another for if there isn't, and so on. He's never been much of a list person, but with twenty hours of downtime and no one to foist off responsibility onto, one adapts.

-

 _Defiance_ beats the shuttle to Joba, so Reyes puts her into orbit around the conveniently close planet of Letapho—inconveniently incapable of supporting life, though—and angles her solar panels towards the sun. With the extra power, he can resume transmission of their encrypted call for help on the frequency the Resistance had used to contact them, and all the lights and climate controls can come back on.

It takes a while for the ship to warm up, but just having the halls lit again does wonders for Reyes' mood, and he's downright cheery even as he continues cleaning up the mess the fire had left behind. Scott and Sara help too, with varying degrees of usefulness as now that they're out of FTL, Sara either has to keep the scrambler close to her or stay confined to her room lest she bring the kett down on them. Nakamoto cooks a hot lunch that they're enjoying in the galley when the long range scanner beeps just before Crux's voice comes over the ship's comms that Reyes has linked to his omni-tool.

"Keema?" She sounds cautiously hopeful. "Reyes?"

"I'd say you're just in time for lunch, but we didn't save you any," Reyes says even though they've just started and the food could be stretched to provide for another three mouths.

"How did you—how did the ship get here? No, don't answer that now, just open the hatch so we can dock."

The starboard shuttle returns to its rightful place, and _Defiance_ has all her crew back again. Reyes goes down to the catwalk to meet them, and though the others aren't much for hugging, they don't push him away when he throws an arm around them and gives them each a brief squeeze.

When Keema wakes up again not long after, all five of the crew crowd around her bed in the medbay, and the relief is clear on her face when she sees them all there. She tells them about the raiders disguised as a transport ship that had answered the distress call, how she'd allowed them to board but hadn't been cautious enough to avoid getting shot, but _had_ been cautious enough to keep a pistol hidden on her that she'd used to take the raiders' captain hostage and force his crew to bring fuel aboard _Defiance_.

"I gave them a few credits so there'd be no hard feelings, told them we'd blow up together if they decided to open fire on _Defiance_ instead of calling it a deal, then they went on their way."

"I thought of doing something like that," Reyes says. "Not the getting shot part—had enough of that for a while—the blowing up part."

"Good thing I was the one who stayed behind then, or we wouldn't have a ship left."

"Hey, I would have held out for an Alliance ship. Or three." He mimes an explosion. "It would have been a sight."

"Maybe, but you weren't here, and I had to get to the medbay before I could call you back. I put some medi-gel on, couldn't tell if it was working or not so I put on some gauze as well to soak up the blood, then I tried to get up to the bridge. Let me tell you, it's not easy to get up all those stairs with a bullet hole in your side. We should think about putting in a lift."

"I had the same thought," Reyes says, "on Mendradym. But at least you had medi-gel."

"You had two people helping you up the stairs, and a working ship."

"Alright, you win."

-

Back to their full complement of crew, Derc takes up the helm again, and Crux and Lynx help Reyes pull out the salvageable components of the port engine so they can space the rest of it and rid themselves of the dead weight. Even with a power boost from the batteries being fully charged, it won't be enough to get them to the Nol system let alone Voeld, but if they encounter raiders, it'll afford them a little more manoeuvrability.

Twelve hours after _Defiance_ 's arrival in Joba, the Resistance sends a message back.

Reyes sends Crux up to the bridge to do captainly things because Keema's still out of commission for the foreseeable future, and he's more of a 'rule from the shadows' sort of person. Two hours later, a Resistance frigate docks at the cargo bay doors.

Reyes is always leery of letting strangers wander _Defiance_ 's halls unattended, but the Resistance crew are well armed and rested and number in the dozens, so there's no stopping them doing a thorough sweep of the ship to confirm the story Crux had told their captain.

"How'd the catalyser blow?" Teresh, a mechanic, asks Reyes as he inspects the bay where the port engine used to be.

"There was too much fire damage to be sure," Reyes says. "We spaced the whole thing a few hours ago if you want to pick it up and take a look yourself. Should still be in orbit."

"Catalysers usually go because something's wrong with their internal chemistry. Yours was probably past its use by date."

"I know," Reyes says with a hint of annoyance. "I was going to replace the entire compression coil on Kadara, but I didn't get the chance."

"You should join up with the Resistance," Teresh says without missing a beat. "We can give your ship a full servicing every time she makes port at one of our bases."

"You need to look at something else or you just want to tell me how to look after my ship?" Reyes says irritably. He's not as upset about _Defiance_ blowing up now that they're not staring in the face of certain death, but he's still touchy about the circumstances that led to the catalyser failing.

"Easy, I didn't mean any offence." Teresh marks something down on his datapad. "Show me your fuel tanks."

After a thorough inspection and questioning, the captain of the frigate _Pasova_ approves the transfer of enough fuel for _Defiance_ to reach Voeld—just enough—and for one of her crew members to donate blood to Keema. Two of them remain aboard to babysit—or, as their captain diplomatically puts it, to catch a ride back to the base on Voeld—while _Pasova_ returns to its post in orbit around Teroshe, on the other side of the system.

-

When they reach Voeld, they're not even allowed to land directly at the base, but are directed to an exposed landing zone on the windward side of a mountain in the middle of a blizzard. Then, they have to wait for the Resistance to send a tracked all-terrain personnel carrier to pick them up, because they're not allowed to know where they're going, and shuttles won't fly in this weather.

They drive for an hour over bumpy terrain that has them constantly knocking into each other, sequestered in the rear section of the carrier where they can't see anything except tiny slivers of white outside through the cracks in door. They've had to bring the scrambler to keep Sara hidden from the kett, which means the locator on Reyes' omni-tool can't get a lock on his location more precise than a circle with a fifty kilometre radius, making them essentially lost.

The driver finds the base with no problem though, smoothly taking another turn that seems just like any other they've taken, and then they're driving down a ramp into an underground parking garage. From there, they go on foot through the maze of passages that make up the base until their guide deposits them in a small, sparsely furnished room and tells them to wait, locking the door behind him as he goes.

"Not a very warm reception," Reyes comments.

Keema glares at him and sits in one of the two chairs in the room. The walk from the garage has taken more out of her than she'd admit, and she's looking rather pale and tired. Reyes knows she wouldn't appreciate him bringing it up in front of the crew though, so he keeps his mouth shut.

"They do seem a rather frigid bunch," Scott ventures.

Reyes shoots him a grin and gets one in return.

Not to be outdone, Lynx comes up with, "That's because they're so icesolated," which Crux follows up with, "Not getting cold feet, are we?" They don't get to cajole Derc into adding to Keema and Nakamoto's growing irritability at being stuck in a room full of children because the door opens then, and in strides none other than the Resistance's illustrious leader himself.

"Evfra de Tershaav," Reyes says. "It's been a long time."

"Have we met?" Evfra narrows his eyes.

"Not in person, but you once knew me as Shena."

"Yes." Evfra's suspicious glare turns flat. "He-who-talks-too-much. I remember."

"Hey now."

"So this is what you've been doing since you disappeared?" Evfra sweeps an unimpressed look over their bedraggled crew.

"We're running a perfectly legitimate business enterprise here."

Evfra snorts. "You've been smuggling since before unification; I should have known I'd find you doing something like this."

 _Defiance_ had done work for the Resistance too, but those jobs had been considerably lower profile than Reyes' former position as an informant in Kadara Port, and it's likely Evfra doesn't know about _Defiance_ 's brief stint fighting for the cause. They still are, in a way, just not Evfra's way.

"If you need cargo moved I'm still your man, but if it's eyes on the ground in Kadara Port you're after, all my information nowadays comes no fewer than third-hand."

"We're well settled in Kadara these days. They seem to be holding their own. For now." Evfra sounds simultaneously impressed and disdainful.

"How fares Aya?"

"Well enough." Evfra looks past Reyes at Keema. "I need to speak to your captain. Alone." He stands to the side, leaving the doorway clear in an indication that Keema's to go first.

"Hey," Reyes says as the two of them make to leave, "what about some snacks? We're starving here." They're not really—they'd eaten not long before landing—but it could be hours before someone comes back for them.

"I'll have something sent over." Evfra shuts the door with a solemn finality, but from what Reyes knows of him, that's probably how he does everything.

It's about ten minutes later that someone brings them a large bowl of quilloa chips, a jug of water, and a stack of glasses. Reyes and the rest of the crew go for the water first—the recycled stuff they drink on _Defiance_ just doesn't taste as good—while Scott and Sara fall on the chips like they really are starving.

"I'm guessing you don't get much angaran cuisine on the Nexus," Reyes says.

"None at all, actually," Scott says. "Classmate from the Academy snuck some of these into the barracks once, though."

Most angara are either in the Resistance or working in occupations that fall outside the scope of the law, so the kett have decided to make an example of them by suppressing any expression of their culture, from their religion and language to the food they eat and the clothes they wear. Angaran civilians trying their best to get on with their lives are closely scrutinised, as is anyone who associates with them. It's a difficult time to be an angara, but at least the younger generation still gets a kick out of venturing into the forbidden.

"What's the Academy like?" Crux asks. She's the youngest out of all the crew at twenty-eight—not accounting for however old Lynx is by asari standards—and had only been eighteen when she'd jumped ship with Sloane and the rest of the exiles. She'd not been as sure of herself then as she is today, and if she'd been on the Nexus when the leadership had surrendered, chances were good she would have ended up in the Alliance.

"Just like any other military training program, I guess." Scott shrugs. "We didn't have to recite a pledge of allegiance to the kett every morning if that's what you're thinking."

The look on some of their faces clearly says that was what they'd been thinking.

"We slept in bunks, got up early to go to training, attended classes on navigation, signalling, marksmanship. We did chores, had curfew, broke curfew, got assigned extra chores for breaking curfew; the usual stuff. There were a few kett around, but they were too high ranking to bother with the recruits, so we only saw them from afar from time to time." Scott looks around the room. "I wonder what it's like to train with the Resistance."

"Less formality, probably. More propaganda, definitely," Reyes says.

"How do you figure that?" Crux asks.

"You get a look at some of the people around the place when we walked in? I'm not saying they all do, but some of them definitely recite a pledge to kill all kett when they wake up in the morning."

"You're thinking of the Roekaar," Derc says.

Reyes shrugs. "Roekaar, Resistance; line's pretty thin these days." Once upon a time, the Resistance had discernibly been the more tempered of the two, but it's only been a year since Reyes saw a squadron of Resistance fighters drop an Alliance cruiser on top of several daara on Havarl. The ratio of civilians to enemy combatants killed had surely been an acceptable number, but Reyes had never thought of Evfra as much of a numbers-only man before that.

-

Keema's only been gone for a bit more than an hour by the time someone comes to take them back to the garage where she's waiting with Evfra.

"Kicking us out already?" Reyes asks.

"We've got a job," Keema answers instead of Evfra.

"Our ship doesn't work, remember? Well, she does, but it's a very loose definition of 'work'."

"You get to stay here and fix her up. Scott and Sara are staying too. The rest of us are going to Techiix."

"All of you?" Reyes doesn't want to say too much with their audience, but Keema's in no condition to be fighting, and surely she knows it.

"All of us," Keema says evenly. "Focus on having a working ship ready when we return."

Keema doesn't come out and say it and neither does Evfra, but it's heavily implied that the job is payment for the parts and labour needed to fix _Defiance_. Reyes hates that the crew are going off without him, but he hates the thought of leaving _Defiance_ in the hands of strange mechanics even more. Nobody knows her like he does.

Derc, Reyes, and a Resistance guide brave the blizzard to bring _Defiance_ from the landing zone to the workshop—the Resistance only allows direct flights into the base during inclement weather to avoid detection—then Derc is off to join Keema, Crux, Lynx, and Nakamoto in the valley. By then, Scott and Sara have been taken to a different part of the base and Reyes doesn't feel like being stared at as he wanders the passages looking for them, so he gets right to work.

-

The hours pass him by without notice as they're wont to do when he's engrossed in a project: he splices the new fuel lines to the old ones, grumbles at the Resistance's mechanics for not having an engine of the exact specifications he needs, bolts it into place anyway, skips dinner in favour of a ration bar, passes out in the engine room some time between midnight and dawn, and wakes up to Scott standing over him.

"What time is it?" Reyes asks, rubbing at the impression of the floor that's imprinted itself into the side of his face.

"It's lunchtime," Scott says. "I came to see if you wanted to grab something to eat in the mess hall, but if I'm interrupting your nap, we can try dinner instead?"

"No, lunch sounds good." Reyes climbs to his feet and takes note of the state his clothes are in, not to mention the way he feels like he's just crawled out of a vat of engine grease. "I'll clean up first. Don't go anywhere."

There's little point to dressing nicely since he'll only be coming back here after they eat, but Reyes makes the effort anyway, if only because they're going to be in a public space for all the Resistance to see.

"Sara going to be joining us?" Reyes asks as Scott leads him to the mess hall, which is far enough from the workshop that there are signposts pointing the way.

"No, she's supposed to be resting. The Resistance medics had a way to permanently disable the trackers in her blood. Apparently, the kett use the same thing on the slaves they keep in labour camps."

"Nakamoto should have stayed behind; he would've gotten a kick out of knowing how they did that." Reyes knows Nakamoto has been reading up on it ever since they'd found out about the trackers, but to no avail.

"One of the medics said there were humans at Techiix that needed medical attention. They haven't had a human specialist there for weeks since the last one was killed in a raid."

"Well, they'd better not get ours killed, or I'll be very put out."

-

The mess hall is a huge, multi-storey room already more than half full, yet everyone seems to know when Scott and Reyes enter, and turn to stare unabashedly at them.

"They're staring at me," Scott says to Reyes as they join the queue for food.

"Oh? A little presumptuous of you, isn't it?" Reyes teases him.

Scott elbows him. "The story about Sara escaping from the Archon's ship has been spreading through the base. Apparently, no one's ever done it before."

"A true pioneer, you are."

"I know they want to ask questions, but I think they're also…afraid." Scott tries on a friendly smile at a group of passing angara who quickly avert their gazes.

"They've been burned by people they thought were on their side before. But I'm sure they'll come around."

By the time they get their food, the angara have conspicuously shuffled around so that the only seats where Scott and Reyes can sit together are in the middle of the room where everyone can see them.

"Sit down," Reyes murmurs when Scott comes to the same realisation and hesitates. "Act natural."

All eyes in the room are on them as they sit down, but Reyes' time on Kadara back when they'd made first contact has inured him to open stares of curiosity and distrust.

"You know where I've been this whole time, but what have you been up to since I last saw you?" he asks Scott.

"Just trying to be there for Sara, mostly. She knows the Resistance hates the kett nearly as much as she does, but she doesn't want to be left alone with strangers. I'm only here now because the doctors had to knock her out to get her to rest after the surgery."

"She doesn't seem the restless sort to me."

Scott grins at that, warm and wistful. "She used to be an absolutely terrible patient. I remember one time when we were down with the flu as kids—and I mean bedridden, our mother had to stay home and look after us—she tried to get me to cover for her so she could sneak out to play her soccer game. She could barely walk let alone run and kick a ball, but she was determined."

"She's more like her old self, you're saying?"

"I still would have gone after her even if she didn't remember who I was, but it's nice to see her regaining her old personality."

Reyes hums in agreement. Sara has so far not been too troublesome of a passenger save for the tracker thing, but it would be nice if she were a little less…creepy. More than once, he's been on his way back to his quarters after a late night's work, and caught a glimpse of Sara lurking in the stairwell or in a dark corner of the galley. Not doing anything, just staring blankly into the middle distance.

"Which of you is the older twin?" Reyes asks to keep the conversation going.

"Sara was, by ten minutes, but seeing as she was in cryo for at least a week recently, I suppose I am now."

"I bet she loves that." Reyes is an only child, but from what he's seen of sibling dynamics, a lot hinges on who's older than who, more so when the age difference is small.

"I don't think she's realised yet. I'm going to save it for when it'll really tick her off."

Scott's good mood persists through lunch, their audience forgotten, but all too soon, it's time for them to part ways, Reyes to finish _Defiance_ 's repairs and Scott to return to his vigil over Sara. Even with the signposts, Reyes gets turned around several times before someone points him in the right direction. On one of his wrong turns though, he comes across a bank of consoles separated by partitions that angara are lining up to use. He learns they're for encrypted communications with loved ones across Voeld, and each call is strictly monitored to ensure no sensitive information is divulged by either party.

The line's not too long, so Reyes joins the end amid curious stares, and when it's his turn, he gets passed around what feels like all of Techiix before Crux ends up on the other side of the call.

"How is everyone?" Reyes asks.

"Great." There's a long silence between his question and Crux's brief reply which probably means Crux was trying to tell him about how the mission went and when the crew are expected back that the censor's cut out. "It's really cold out here," is the next part deemed safe to transmit. "Freezing our asses off, and for what?"

Another long silence.

"Good to hear from you." Reyes gives up on trying to have a conversation. From Crux's tone of voice, everyone sounds alright, if a little cold. "Let's talk again soon."

-

 _Defiance_ is ready to leave before her crew are. Reyes spends two days in the workshop helping the Resistance mechanics with their repairs, has lunch with Scott and dinner with Scott and Sara, who seems more lucid than Reyes remembers her ever being. She still isn't talking much, but whatever the Resistance medics did seems to be helping.

Early morning on the third day of what is practically a vacation for Reyes, the crew trudges back into the base, exhausted and freezing, but all present. Reyes has taken to sleeping in the medbay lounge, so he hears them the moment they come aboard through the cargo bay doors, and casually steps through the doorway like he hasn't spent the last two days waiting for their return.

"Welcome home!" he says exuberantly even though it's not even five o'clock. "Did you all have a good time in the field?"

"It was all right, as missions went," Keema says.

The others ignore him in favour of climbing the stairs to get to their sorely-missed quarters, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind.

"What did you get up to?" Reyes asks.

"Just business as usual for the Resistance: the kett try to push forward into Techiix, the Resistance pushes back. The Resistance tries to push into the kett command centre, the kett push back."

"Sounds exhausting." Someone's got to stand their ground against the kett on contested planets like this, Reyes supposes, but he's glad it's not him.

"Quite. I'm supposed to report in to Evfra, but he can stand to wait a few more hours." Keema starts up the stairs after the others.

Reyes would go back to sleep, but he's wide awake now with nothing to do: _Defiance_ is in better condition now than when he'd bought her, with every scratch buffed and every gear greased and precisely aligned, and all of Reyes' side projects need parts from elsewhere to be completed.

He knows the base never sleeps, so he goes for a walk instead of finding something on the ship to occupy him. The novelty of having outsiders amongst them has worn thin for most of the Resistance, and Reyes gets barely a glance as he wanders aimlessly through the passages.

Eventually, his feet take him to the medical wing, which is abuzz with the recent arrival of a shuttle's worth of casualties. He slips past the commotion to the private rooms around the back, one of which Scott and Sara have been put up in as a concession to the unique medical curiosity that Sara presents.

She's awake and flaring blue, which she's doing more often nowadays, before Reyes even closes the door behind him. "It's me," he says quietly, not moving so Sara can take a good look and verify he's someone she knows.

Her biotic flare dies down and she settles herself back against the pillows. "What do you want?"

"The crew's back." A second bed has been brought in for Scott and it takes up the space where the visitors' chairs usually go, so Reyes is left with nowhere else to sit but at the foot of Scott's bed. Scott doesn't even twitch in response. "We'll probably be leaving soon."

"Not us," Sara says. "The Resistance wants to keep me. They think I'll magically remember the floorplan of the Archon's ship and all its weak points if they just poke the right parts of my brain."

"I thought you weren't letting anyone do that." Not that Reyes thinks she'd be able to fend off a squad of Resistance fighters if they decide to give her no say in the matter, but things don't seem to have reached that point yet.

"I'm not, but I know they're thinking it."

"You're ready to get out, then?"

"With you? I thought we couldn't pay."

"Scott'll be good for it."

"Hng?" Scott can sleep through hell and high water, but one mention of his name and he's awake in an instant.

"Just discussing some plans for later in the day." Reyes pats Scott's leg. "I'll catch you up later."

"Hm." Scott buries his face back into his pillow and is asleep in an instant. It's ridiculously endearing.

"We'll finish this later," Reyes says to Sara. He doesn't want to go making promises without consulting Keema first, but he and Scott have unfinished business, and where Scott goes, Sara does too.

By the time he makes his way back to the workshop, it's a reasonable hour to pretend he's just gotten up, and he heads to the mess hall for breakfast with the other mechanics.

Evfra's there too, and Reyes doesn't duck out of his line of sight fast enough to avoid being hounded for the report Keema was supposed to give. Reyes denies any knowledge of Keema being in the base even though there are probably handfuls of witnesses who can attest otherwise, and Evfra storms off in the direction of the workshop. If he annoys Keema by breaking into the ship and knocking on her door, Reyes will at least be free of blame.

He lingers in the mess hall for well over an hour until he's sure it's safe to head back to _Defiance_ , but when he gets there, Evfra is in the galley with the rest of the crew, who look nowhere near as well-rested as they'd clearly hoped to be.

"There you are," Keema says when she sees Reyes.

"I didn't know we were having a meeting; I would have walked slower if I had." Reyes stays in the doorway, crossing his arms and leaning against the door frame. "What's this about?"

"We've got a job."

"For the Resistance?"

"Is that going to be a problem?"

Reyes shrugs. "It's your call, Captain." There are problems, alright, but Reyes isn't going to argue with Keema while Evfra's still there.

"And what of our two passengers?" Keema asks Evfra.

"Perhaps it's best if they stay with us," Evfra says.

"Perhaps not." Reyes opens up his omni-tool and messages Scott and Sara to come over since no one else seems to be doing so.

"A rather sizeable bounty has been put out on their heads: five thousand for the girl, three thousand for the boy, or ten thousand together. This is the safest place for them to be."

"The Resistance is not without its share of traitors and spies," Reyes says idly.

"That may be so, but we have an even larger share of members with bounties on them. Much larger bounties than the ones on your friends combined, might I add. We know how to take care of our own."

"'Your own'. You mean angara?"

"The Resistance welcomes all species willing to aid us in the fight against the kett," Evfra says stiffly.

"But when the going gets tough, the first to be told to get going are the non-angara, right?"

"How dare you." Evfra's voice goes deadly quiet as he turns his full attention on Reyes. "We would never abandon—"

"Don't feel bad, the rest of us would probably do the same." Well, maybe, maybe not, since the Milky Way species have had more time to make cross-species attachments, but one does tend to feel a certain kinship to those most like them that can't be helped.

Keema narrows her eyes at Reyes, a clear message to stop antagonising the Resistance's commander on his home turf.

"Here's a crazy idea: we ask Scott and Sara where they'd like to stay." Reyes takes a step back, intending to take this conversation outside in the hopes that they'll run into the aforementioned fugitives.

"Ask who?" Right on time, Scott comes up the stairs, Sara close behind him.

"Scott! So good of you to join us. _Defiance_ is scheduled to leave soon, and Evfra has offered you a place in the Resistance instead of shipping out with us. What do you say?"

"I…" Scott looks over his shoulder.

Through the small gap between Scott's shoulder and the wall, Reyes sees Sara shake her head.

"Thanks for the offer, but we won't be staying," Scott says.

Evfra's lips thin. "Surely as the captain you'll have the final say?" he asks Keema.

"They can come, as long as they promise to pull their own weight." Keema looks at Scott and Sara, who both nod. "Was there anything else you needed from us?"

With what looks like great effort, Evfra says, "That's all." He sees himself off the ship with a familiarity with its layout that Reyes isn't sure he likes.

Crux waits until they hear the cargo bay door close before asking, "What's your problem with the Resistance?"

"Nothing," Reyes says unconvincingly. He's surprised Crux hasn't defected already; with the fierce loyalty she'd shown the Collective, transitioning to the Resistance only seems like a natural next step. "Remember Gartan?"

"That could have happened on any job."

"I know, it's just that with all the crap the Resistance spouts about us all being in this fight together, they were awfully quick to leave us behind." Reyes is just a little bit bitter about how that last job had gone.

"They just wanted to finish the mission."

" _I know_ ," Reyes stresses. "I don't have a problem with the Resistance." He leaves for the engine room to avoid further discussion of the subject.

He can hear the others still talking in the galley, but the words are too indistinct to make out exactly what they're saying. Soft footsteps are approaching the engine room, though. Reyes keeps his back to the door and pretends to be intently studying the drive core output readings.

"Who's Gartan?" The unexpected sound of Scott's voice startles Reyes out of his charade.

"Our former co-pilot," Reyes says without turning around. "He died four years ago and I've been picking up his slack ever since."

"What happened?"

Reyes sighs. He doesn't want to naysay the Resistance when they're the main force holding back the kett, but he'd lost one of his crew, damn it, and it still stings. "We used to run jobs for the Resistance when things in the freelance smuggling sector got quiet. Four years ago, we were asked to provide backup for two Resistance frigates that were going to hit a kett supply route in some remote system. It was more or less a success, but one of the smaller kett ships transporting weapons got away, and our Resistance escorts wanted to go after them. Problem was, _Defiance_ had taken a bad hit, and we couldn't give chase easily, so they told us to stay put."

"They left you behind?"

"They left us all alone, essentially crippled, right alongside a route known to be frequented by the kett. All to chase down one measly shipload of guns." Reyes doesn't even know if they'd succeeded in catching up to the transport.

"And the kett found you?"

"Came out of nowhere, hit us square on the starboard side. The engine was destroyed, and we had the biggest hull breach I'd ever seen on a ship this size where the crew survived to tell about it." _Defiance_ doesn't bear the scars of that battle anymore save for a blackened interior wall panel that hadn't been damaged enough to replace, but Reyes still gives her starboard side a little more love when he performs maintenance.

"Gartan was in engineering at the time trying to help me reset the systems, and…I don't know if it was the initial blast that killed him or whether he got spaced, but I couldn't go down to check. I got the drive core working, Derc gunned the port engine, and we got the hell out of there as fast as we could. Dropped off our cargo and got repairs done on Voeld, and never took another Resistance job again. Why bother watching someone's back if they're not going to watch yours, right?" What's just happened is disturbingly similar, except this time, they've come away working for the Resistance again.

"Surely not everyone in the Resistance is like that."

"Statistically? No, but you see things when you're out and about in the cluster, and the Resistance of late has been getting a little…desperate. Decades of fighting will do that to you, I suppose. I just don't want to be around the next time someone decides what's an acceptable sacrifice to make. Or worse, be the one who has to make the choice. Cowardly, I know."

Life as an independent smuggling ship is easy; the only interests you have to look out for are your own, with no need to worry about how your actions will affect a bigger picture. It's one of the reasons Reyes had been partly relieved to leave behind the Collective and the mantle of the Charlatan.

"Hey, don't sell yourself short." Scott's hand comes to a gentle rest on Reyes' shoulder. "You're a good person, Reyes."

"We're all just out here doing what we can." Reyes gives Scott a small rueful smile and pats his hand in thanks. "Come on. Let's get back out there before the others think I'm sulking."


	7. Muscle Memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's back to business as usual for the crew of _Defiance_. Well, almost.

"Sara! What are you doing with that?" Scott carefully approaches Sara and holds out his hand for the pistol she's holding. "Can I have that?" he says gently.

"I thought…" Sara's brow is furrowed as she brings the pistol up to shoulder height, and everyone instinctively ducks. Everyone except for Scott, that is, who flinches but holds his ground like the idiot with no self-preservation that he is. "Did I…use to fight?"

"What? No! You were a researcher, you wanted to develop biotic implants, like—like—"

Like their mother, Ellen, now two years dead. It clearly pains Scott to think that Sara's forgotten her, but then Sara nods.

"I remember. Won't be needing this, then." The pistol falls to the floor with a clatter as she walks away.

Scott follows her while Reyes scoops up the pistol before anyone gets shot; the safety is off, Sara's grip and stance had been perfect, and there'd been a calculating determination in her eyes. If she'd pulled the trigger, Reyes doesn't think she would have missed.

"That was close," Keema says.

It's not the first incident they've had since leaving Voeld. The crew had been rudely awakened at midnight just two nights ago when Sara had lost control while experimenting with her biotics and started a fire in the galley, triggering the fire alarm. The day before that, Nakamoto had complained about the medbay being completely trashed, and Reyes has noticed his tools appearing in odd places on the ship that Crux and Lynx deny moving. It's nothing overly worrying yet—just a wrench, a few screwdrivers, and a pair of pliers—but he always keeps them in the engine room, and there are plenty of more dangerous objects there like nail guns and welding torches. He's taken to locking the engine room door when he leaves for the night, which could be why Sara's progressed to playing with guns.

"This is Scott's." Reyes recognises the pistol as the one Keema had given Scott for the job on Elaaden and never taken back.

"I'll tell him to keep his weapons locked up." Keema takes the pistol from Reyes, and that's that.

-

Well, in theory it is, but in practice, there's a palpable tension on the ship afterwards, enough for Keema to ground _Defiance_ for a few days when they make a delivery to Fribourg so they can have some breathing space. That mostly means sending Sara out on easy jobs with a rotating member of the crew to keep an eye on her, but if Sara notices she's being babysat, she doesn't object. If anything, it seems to do her some good too. Her memory is still as spotty as ever, but she has more awareness of her surroundings now and manages to go all four days without endangering herself or the crew.

Of course, it's on the fifth day when Reyes is flying with Sara to their client's pickup point that they run into trouble.

"Guess we've overstayed our welcome," Reyes says as he swerves to dodge the stream of bullets the shuttle behind them is shooting.

"They could be guarding the goods," Sara points out, hands hovering over the co-pilot's side of the console as she tries to switch the camera feed from the underside camera to the rear one.

"Orange button in the top left corner. Let's see how far they chase us."

Reyes leads their pursuer over the hills and into the forest, grimacing as tree branches scrape against the sides of the shuttle; more work for him to do later, but it'll be an easier fix than bullet holes.

"Reyes." The shuttle's comm crackles to life with Keema's voice.

"Little busy here," Reyes says, tilting the steering column sharply upwards to avoid a falling tree.

"They found you too, then?"

"Bounty hunters?"

The bounty on Scott and Sara has been steadily rising with every week they remain free, and somehow, news has spread that they're travelling aboard _Defiance_. The bounty hunters so far have only attacked them in space though, where it's been easy enough to fire up the drive core and jump to another system.

"Looks like it." A hail of gunfire in the background. "We need to take off. I'll send you our navpoint once we lose them."

"Roger that."

"How do they know we're in this shuttle?" Sara asks, surprisingly calm for being the person most at risk if their escape goes awry.

"They could have been keeping an eye on the ship and waiting for us to split up. Or our client could have sold us out." It is rather fishy that the bounty hunters only struck once Reyes and Sara got close to the pickup point. "Doesn't matter now. Let's focus on getting out of here first."

"What can I do?"

"Let's see how much they like being shot at."

The controls for the shuttle's two guns are located in the central console area, so Reyes can point out which switches Sara needs to flip and which buttons to push while also keeping an eye on their flight path.

Sara keeps the other pilot distracted by shooting back at them while Reyes pushes the shuttle deeper into the forest despite the copious amount of damage it does to the paintwork—and to the foliage, he supposes—and they lose their visual of the bounty hunters' shuttle. Reyes slows down just a little to save fuel, but he doesn't let up completely until they're deep in the forest with no signs of pursuit.

"Looks like we lost them." Reyes lands the shuttle and powers it down so they won't show up on scanners if the other shuttle passes overhead. "Let's sit tight until—"

An explosion rocks the forest and fells a few trees not far from them.

"Seriously?" Reyes peers up through the front windscreen, trying to discern how far away the other shuttle is.

"Shouldn't we go?" Sara asks when another explosion, this one even closer, sends shockwaves through the shuttle.

"Not yet, I think they want to take us alive. Or you, at least."

There's another explosion, then the bounty hunters' shuttle is descending into the newly-cleared patch of forest.

"Now?" Sara asks.

From what Reyes can see of the other shuttle, it's nearly twice as big as theirs, and much more heavily armed. "On foot, come on." He takes out the rifle that's locked in the drawer beside the pilot's chair. "I'll go left and draw their fire," he says as they leave the shuttle. "You go right and stay hidden until the fighting dies down."

"I want to fight," Sara says. "Give me a gun."

"No way; you start shooting, and they'll shoot back. But if they don't know where you are, you should have enough time to call Derc for a pickup even if I go down. Here's the frequency."

Sara reluctantly trudges off into the forest while Reyes circles the clearing and observes the bounty hunters. They've spread out and are approaching the shuttle in a staggered line with some taking cover amongst the trees. Reyes goes for the one closest to him first, slinging the rifle over his back and getting out his firaan.

Small, sharp, and angaran-made, it pulses slightly with electricity as he thrusts it into the back of the bounty hunter that passes him, and they go down without a sound. One down, who knows how many more to go.

He takes out another just as quietly, but then he sees that the hunters on the other side of the clearing are getting close to where Sara's hiding, and changes tactics.

Reyes comes out of the forest behind the hunters' shuttle and opens fire on the two closest to him, sending them scrambling for cover and drawing the others' attention. He backs up into the forest as they converge on him, and tries to hit as many of them as he can before they have him surrounded. He's doing well for being so outnumbered until the hunters draw back, and whoever's left aboard the shuttle turns the swivel gun on top towards him.

"That's just not fair," Reyes mutters to himself as he abandons stealth and makes a run for it.

Bullets thud into the trees around him, spraying leaves and bits of bark into the air. One narrowly misses his side, ripping a tear in his jacket, and another passes by overhead, so close he can feel the rush of wind in his hair.

He slides down a deceptively steep slope and throws himself to the ground to stop his descent, then waits for the swivel gun to overheat. When the sound of gunfire stops, he scrambles back up the slope and searches for the bounty hunters through the scope of his rifle.

Reyes takes out two in quick succession that are just barely within the rifle's range; he'll need to move closer for the others. Unfortunately, moving through the forest makes him more visible to them than they are to him, and he finds himself rolling behind a tree without spotting anymore hunters.

He can hear shouting though, and by the sounds of things, they're getting the swivel gun ready to fire again. While they're preoccupied with that, Reyes sticks his head out just enough to take aim.

He never gets the chance to shoot, because the hunter he has in his sights crumples to the ground, a spray of blood where their head had once been. Reyes lowers the rifle, listens as two more gunshots ring out, and watches as two more bodies drop onto the dirt. Then, there's silence.

Reyes carefully approaches the hunters' shuttle, keeping his rifle at the ready. On the other side of the shuttle, there's a gunshot, and he rounds the corner ready to take out another hunter only to come face to face with none other than Sara, holding a pistol and standing in the direct line of sight of a corpse with a single bullet hole in its forehead.

There it is again: the same calculated determination Reyes had seen in Sara's eyes that day she'd nearly shot someone in the cargo bay. It fades away quickly enough that Reyes might be able to convince himself he'd imagined it if not for the four bodies around Sara he knows he's not responsible for.

"Where did you learn to do that?" Reyes asks.

"No power in the 'verse can stop me," Sara says, eyes full of awe and a hint of a smile on her lips that Reyes' can't bring himself to return.

"Let's get back to our shuttle," he says. "Leave the gun."

They probably could have made a few credits gathering up the bounty hunters' weapons and selling them, but to be perfectly honest, Reyes doesn't want Sara to be around unsecured weapons right now. He doesn't know if she can tell friend from foe when she gets into that…state of hers, and he's not eager to be the first to find out.

-

Much to Reyes' annoyance, _Defiance_ is riddled with bullet holes when they reunite.

"What did you do to my ship?" he growls at Keema only half-jokingly.

"Everyone's fine, thanks for asking," she says, unperturbed. "How about you?"

"Nothing we couldn't handle." Reyes looks over his shoulder at Sara, who nods. "Talk to you later," he murmurs just loud enough for Keema to hear as he passes.

They abandon the job and leave Fribourg and the Vaalon system behind for friendlier pastures. Reyes doesn't know where exactly, because he's in his quarters busy picking out splinters from just about every bit of exposed skin and applying the medi-gel he'd swiped from the medbay while Nakamoto had been busy tending to a gunshot wound to the arm that Lynx had sustained.

Keema finds Reyes half an hour later, still in his quarters mending the tear in his jacket—another one to add to the collection, but it's a waste to throw out a perfectly good jacket just because it's seen some action—and invites herself in. She sits on his bed since he's in the chair at his desk with the lamp pulled close.

"What did you want to talk about?" Keema prompts when Reyes pays her no mind.

He ties off the thread and tucks the knot under the previous stitches. "We lost the bounty hunters in the forest and I landed the shuttle so we could lie low until you were clear. They found us anyway, or they were getting close enough, so I suggested we leave the shuttle where it was and take them out on the ground."

"You gave Sara a gun?"

"I did _not_. I told her to hide while I took care of things, and for a while, it was going well. Then those cheaters started using their shuttle's gun, and things got a little heated, but I was managing just fine on my own before someone started stealing my kills."

"Sara?"

"Four headshots, four bodies. With a pistol."

"It couldn't have been someone else? A sniper?"

"Remember the gun in the cargo bay?"

"Of course."

"She was standing near a corpse with a gun in her hand, and the same look on her face. There was no doubting it. And when I asked how she did it, she—you were there the night we watched that old Earth vid, right? The one in the desert with the horses and guns?" And spaceships, for some unfathomable reason, but it had been well-liked enough by someone in the Initiative to deem it worth carrying across galaxies.

"If by 'horses' you mean those tall, hairy taurgs with the long mouths that you humans seem to have a fondness for sitting on, then yes."

"'No power in the 'verse can stop me'. Sara said that to me."

"Isn't that a line from the vid? From when—"

"Yeah."

Keema worries her bottom lip in a decidedly non-angaran manner. "What are you thinking?"

"I think before she lost her memories, someone taught her how to fight. She might be on our side for now, but who knows what will happen as she gets more of her memory back?"

"You think she could be a danger to us."

"I don't know. Someone could have been training her to fight kett, or the kett could have been training her to fight us. Until we know more, we'd be wise to be careful around her."

"Business as usual, then."

"Exactly."

Keema nods with satisfaction and makes to leave, but pauses on the ladder up to the deck. "Reyes?"

"Yeah?"

"No more shooting vids until we get to the bottom of this."

"No, we wouldn't want to give her more ideas."

-

They jump over to the Vaotessa system and land at a tiny outpost in the middle of a frigid desert on Netiquur for repairs. Parts are more expensive here, but they can also get a better price for their cargo bay full of salvage. Reyes stays behind to repair _Defiance_ , as usual, but he also snags Crux and Lynx to help while the rest of the crew—Scott and Sara included—go into the outpost to trade and pick up more jobs.

Afternoon turns to evening, and Keema comms them to have _Defiance_ ready for takeoff with an urgency in her voice that only arises when something is seriously amiss, so Reyes doesn't make his usual complaints about having to stop mid-repair. He waits on the bridge while Crux and Lynx stand ready at the cargo bay doors, armed in case the others are coming back hot, but they're not in the kind of trouble he'd expected.

"Reyes, get down here," Crux says. "Medbay."

Reyes thinks of Scott lying in the medbay after pushing him out of the way of an explosion, of Keema fighting desperately to save the ship after they'd all left her behind, and with those vivid images in mind, he can't reconcile what he sees before him: Nakamoto's out cold, a patch of red seeping through the hastily-applied bandages on the upper left side of his chest.

"What happened?"

"The fence we were dealing with didn't have the best relationship with the local authorities. There was a shootout, and Nakamoto got caught in the crossfire," Keema explains. "He wasn't even—he was at the general store across the street."

"What do we do?" Reyes asks as he tries to remember the first aid training he'd had and the impromptu lessons Nakamoto's given them over the years. He can't come up with anything beyond apply pressure—which Lynx is already doing—and get a doctor, which…well. Having a doctor in their crew's made them complacent.

"We get him to a doctor. This outpost's too small to have one, so we'll need to fly to a bigger one."

"Bigger one's going to have an Alliance garrison." A thought appears to Reyes as he looks around the medbay for more ideas. "Where are Scott and Sara?"

"Don't know, we split up. But maybe it's just as well we don't have them on board when we go to the Alliance and ask them for help."

"We're leaving them behind?" Keema's right, but it leaves a heavy feeling in Reyes' stomach to be flying away without Scott and Sara.

"We'll come back, assuming the Alliance lets us go. And if they don't, the two of them will be glad we left them behind. Send them a message and let's be off."

Reyes calls Scott to apprise him of the situation, and Scott agrees that the best thing for him and Sara to do is to lie low in town.

"Get yourselves a room," Reyes suggests. "We could be a while, and people will start to talk if they've read your arrest warrant or heard of your bounty and see a brother and sister walking around town together."

"Got it. Don't worry about us."

-

Derc takes them up so they can look for the nearest major outpost: Cantlyn Hold, built into the side of a mountain half an hour's flight away.

"Swarming with Alliance," Derc says with a sigh over the comms as he sets their course. "It was nice knowing you all."

"Relax," Keema says. "We're independent traders who ran afoul of bandits." She looks around the medbay: Lynx is holding an increasingly-sodden wad of gauze to Nakamoto's chest, and Crux is working a manual resuscitator as they haven't been able to figure out how the ventilator works. "Reyes, go check our paperwork."

It's an unnecessary precaution—they'd landed on Netiquur under an assumed name and with fake registration—but it'll make everyone less nervous about brazenly walking into the arms of the Alliance, and it gives Reyes something else to do besides standing around helplessly.

"What do we know about the outpost?" Reyes asks Derc as he slides into the co-pilot's chair.

"Surrounded by walls on three sides and the Rhaling Mountains on the fourth. Turrets along the walls every fifty metres, though only outwards-facing, so we should be safe from them once we're inside the outpost. Last recorded population of about four hundred civilians and two hundred military personnel."

Reyes lets out a whistle. "Desperate times."

"Desperate measures."

-

The Alliance pings them for flying through restricted airspace about a kilometre out from the outpost, and Derc announces their need for an emergency landing, giving the controller on the other end of the line the requested details about _Defiance_ —temporarily renamed _Singularity_ —and her crew, names and histories all falsified and easily found in the Alliance database.

The controller puts them into a holding pattern for about fifteen minutes while their request is escalated, and when they're finally given clearance to land at a hangar uncomfortably close to the centre of the outpost, it's been over an hour since Nakamoto had been shot.

Reyes, Derc, and Keema stand unarmed in the cargo bay to welcome the squad of uniformed Alliance soldiers that come in to verify their story and sweep the ship ahead of the promised medics that relieve Crux and Lynx and transfer Nakamoto onto a shuttle.

"You lot stay here," the squadron's commanding officer says to the rest of them as the soldiers file out. "We'll be keeping an eye on you."

-

It's over four tense hours later when they're informed over the radio that Nakamoto's out of surgery and in a stable condition, but the doctors want to keep him overnight for observation.

"It's standard procedure," Keema says when the crew look to each other uneasily. "There's no need to make a big deal of it. Everyone get some rest, and we'll leave in the morning."

Reyes can't sleep easily in his quarters knowing they're in what essentially amounts to enemy territory, so after a sleepless hour, he grabs his pillow and blanket and goes up to the medbay lounge to find that Crux has already beaten him to the couch there. She's sound asleep, so he concedes the spot and sets up on an air mattress in the cargo bay, off to the side where he has a clear view of the doors, but anyone coming in won't spot him immediately. Just in case.

What feels like not nearly long enough later, Keema nudges him in the back with her foot, and Reyes is up in a flash, the pistol he'd gone to sleep holding at the ready.

"Put that away," Keema hisses. "The medics are bringing Nakamoto back."

Reyes checks his omni-tool: 5 a.m. local time. "At this hour?"

"Days start early in the Alliance, apparently. Or they've got something up their sleeves. Either way, look sharp. But not too sharp, in case they get suspicious."

Their well-founded paranoia turns out to be unnecessary, as the shuttle that lands next to them really has brought Nakamoto back, and the Alliance captain that accompanies him gives them a formal warning about keeping their registration markings up to date and clearly legible, but otherwise, they're free to go.

"Let's never do this again," Crux says, sitting heavily down on a crate as Derc takes _Defiance_ up. "I thought they were going to arrest us for sure."

"We survive to break the law another day," Reyes says with a yawn. "Let's get Scott and Sara back, then get off this miserable rock."

"There are still repairs to be done," Lynx points out.

"We've stirred enough waves here," Keema says. "Let's not wait for them to circle back to us."

It's just before dawn, so when Scott doesn't pick up the first time Reyes calls, he doesn't think too much of it. Sara doesn't pick up either, which isn't unusual as she still shies away from conversations she doesn't initiate. Then, Scott doesn't pick up the second call, or the third, or the fourth. Even if he was fast asleep, the vibration of his omni-tool would've woken Sara.

"I can't get ahold of Scott," Reyes says to Keema.

"Sara?"

"You know she never picks up." Reyes calls her again anyway. "Voicemail."

"Hm," Keema says. "Check the scanner."

The scanner turns up two shuttles in the town square.

"That's not good," Keema says. "Alliance?"

"Can't tell from this distance," Derc says, "but maybe we can listen in on their channel."

Reyes scrolls through the radio frequencies until something Alliance-sounding comes up, then tunes the receiver to get a clearer signal.

_—identity confirmed. Returning to base, ETA thirty minutes._

_Copy that._

"Veer away from the outpost," Keema says to Derc. "If they have Scott and Sara, they'll be looking for the ship that brought them here."

"They must have," Reyes says, still listening intently even though the channel's gone silent. "Even Scott wouldn't sleep through this. Sara definitely wouldn't."

Off in the distance, a shuttle ascends from the outpost and sets off towards Cantlyn Hold, followed closely by another.

"Take us into town, but be careful in case the Alliance are still around," Keema says.

They see a few soldiers lurking around the docks, so Derc sets _Defiance_ down outside the outpost instead, and Reyes and Keema go in on foot. It really is a tiny outpost, so it takes all of fifteen minutes for them to search the major buildings and ask the colonists why the Alliance had been in town. They all say the same thing: two shuttles had landed unannounced, the captain of each squad had flashed their credentials around, then soldiers had stormed the bunkhouse and taken a young man and woman accused of being violent criminals into custody.

"They must be nearly at the garrison by now," Keema says as she closes _Defiance_ 's cargo bay doors behind her. "How many soldiers did Derc say there were? Two hundred?"

"Military personnel," Reyes corrects. "That includes non-combatants."

"Even so, that's much more than we can handle." Keema presses the speaker button for the intercom by the stairs. "Derc, get us out of here."

"We have to go back," Reyes says immediately.

"No way." Keema keeps climbing the stairs. " _Defiance_ is in Alliance records now, and giving them a different name isn't going to help if they try digging into her history."

"They wouldn't bother."

"They might if we swoop in and snatch up two of their most wanted fugitives."

True, but, "We can't leave them. Not after everything we've already been through together."

"What's gotten into you?" Keema gives Reyes a sharp look. "Have you and Scott been sleeping together?"

Reyes scowls at her. "No."

"So is this regret from a missed opportunity speaking?"

"No! Yes. No—what kind of question is that?"

"Just trying to determine where this sudden change of heart is coming from."

"You wouldn't leave one of the crew behind."

"They're not crew."

"Why not?"

It's been two weeks since they left Voeld and nearly a month since they picked up Scott and Sara in Kadara Port, and since then, the two of them have done just as much around the ship and on jobs as the rest of the crew. Reyes sees Keema thinking it over and coming to the same conclusion.

"We might be better off without crew members who are apt to put us in danger with every second we spend with them," she says, clearly more for argument's sake than because she truly believes it.

"If you're talking about the bounty or the Alliance, we've handled worse and come out on top. If you mean Sara, she's been more of a help than a hindrance lately."

"What about Fribourg?"

"She helped." Reyes is aware he'd been the first to voice his misgivings about Sara's mental stability, but the thought of leaving her behind on the basis of what amounts to a series of freak incidents that didn't result in any actual harm to any of the crew doesn't sit right with him.

Keema gives him a long, almost suspicious look. "Alright, then," she eventually says. "It won't do to leave one of the crew behind, let alone two of them." She activates her comm. "Derc, turn this ship around."

-

They burn through as much fuel as they dare to get back to Cantlyn Hold as quickly as they can, but there's no way they'll be able to reach the outpost before Scott and Sara are taken off the shuttle and to a more secure holding facility.

"What's the plan?" Reyes asks, compiling a list of resources they can make use of in his head.

"We get in, get them, and get out," Keema says.

"Not much of a plan," Derc says.

"I'm still working out the details. Suggestions are welcome."

The static from the Alliance channel they're still tuned to is punctuated by barely-intelligible words.

_—transport—ETA fifteen—ready—prisoners—_

"A transport ship?" Reyes hazards a guess, leaning closer to the speaker.

_—roof—side—_

"Not very helpful," Derc says.

"Unless they've got other prisoners waiting for pickup, Scott and Sara are on a roof somewhere in the outpost. If we can beat the transport ship there, we might have a chance," Reyes says.

"We won't have much time," Keema says. "If we can get inside the outpost walls, we won't have to deal with the turrets, but who knows what other defences might be hidden inside."

"A shuttle, then? I can feign an engine malfunction to get it over the wall, and it won't be recognised on sight like _Defiance_ will."

"We won't all be able to fit in a shuttle."

"I'll take Lynx, if she'll come. Her biotics might come in handy."

Keema takes a moment to mull over Reyes' plan, then nods. "Good luck. We'll keep the engine running just outside their airspace."

Lynx isn't as sure of the plan, but she agrees to go with Reyes anyway. They separate from _Defiance_ a good distance away from the outpost, and Reyes brings the shuttle up high enough for them to glide in without crashing. When air traffic control makes contact, Reyes puts on a show of not being able to control the shuttle, and pulls it into a haphazard spiral over the nominated landing zone. At the last minute, he turns the engine back on and veers away from the hangar.

"Don't need any distractions," he says as he cuts the connection to the control tower. "See anyone waiting on a rooftop?"

"Try north," Lynx says.

On the roof of a building large enough to land a shuttle on is a squadron of Alliance soldiers trying to get to cover, having apparently been apprised of the situation that's just popped up. Fortunately for Reyes and Lynx, there's still a considerable distance between them and the door, and a spray of bullets across that space sends them scattering, leaving their two prisoners in the open.

"That's them," Lynx confirms. "Hold her steady, I'm opening the door."

The Alliance will start shooting back at any minute now, not to mention what other forces they might be scrambling, but Reyes brings the shuttle in closer anyway, shooting blindly at anywhere Scott and Sara are not, just to keep the soldiers on their toes. Lynx opens the side door and clips the harness she's wearing to the rail on the inside of the shuttle to anchor herself, then swings out, and the shuttle lights up in blue as she fires up her biotics. Someone comes hurtling into the shuttle, and Reyes looks over his shoulder to see that it's Sara.

"Think you can remember how to put up a barrier?" he shouts over the gunfire. The shuttle's shields are depleting too quickly for comfort, but he'd rather Lynx focus on getting Scott out of the line of fire before they lose the opportunity.

Sara doesn't answer him, but through the rear view mirror, Reyes sees her climb to her feet and close her eyes. Her biotics flare to life, then a bubble of electric blue expands outwards to encompass the shuttle, causing it to shake violently in the process.

"What's going on back there?" Lynx shouts.

"Everything's under control!" Reyes shouts back even as he hopes Sara doesn't miscalculate and fry the shuttle's electronics instead. The shield gauge on the dashboard seems to be holding steady though, so the barrier seems to be working after all.

Lynx yells in frustration at whatever's happening on the ground, but then the shuttle dips a little with a sudden addition of weight, and a glance in the mirror shows Scott's joined them on board.

"Time to get the hell out of here." Lynx closes the door and sits herself back in the co-pilot's chair, taking control of the guns as Reyes pushes the shuttle to its limits.

Bullets follow them out of the outpost, but Sara manages to keep the barrier going strong until they're out of range of the turrets, whereupon she falls back into one of the passenger seats with a heavy sigh.

"Why did you come back?" Scott asks in the ensuing silence.

Reyes shrugs. "You're crew."


	8. Tianfei Station

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nakamoto proposes a heist. Amongst other things.

They run and don't stop running until they're in Faross. It's probably unnecessary, but having just had such a close call with the Alliance, it's better to be further away than closer.

_Defiance_ docks at Zyrik Station and finally gets her much-needed repairs while Derc and Keema gather information on new jobs and Alliance chatter respectively. But it's Lynx who goes out to buy new filters for their water tanks who comes back with the most important news.

"The Alliance put out a bounty on us." She brings up the entry on one of the extranet noticeboards that bounty hunters frequent.

"Where did you find this?" Reyes asks.

They never check those boards because bounty hunting is more personal a job than they're willing to handle—personal in that others take it personally when you get to the target first and deprive them of their bounty. They have enough petty squabbles in the smuggling business to deal with already.

"Overheard some ice runners thinking of changing careers," Lynx says. "The bounty stands at two thousand credits a head, with an extra three thousand each for Scott and Sara, or thirty thousand if we get brought in together."

Reyes whistles. "That's…" he tries to remember what Evfra had told them back on Voeld, "about the same as before, wasn't it? For those two, at least."

"Right, that other bounty? Not posted by the Alliance." Lynx brings up another entry. "Whoever it was, they've upped their reward to match, but they're not interested in us."

The bounty now stands at ten thousand for Scott, fifteen thousand for Sara, or thirty thousand together. However, the condition that they be unharmed still stands whereas the Alliance only has a 'to be brought in alive' clause in theirs.

"Who do you think posted the original bounty?" Reyes asks. "Has anyone been able to find out?"

"Not even a clue," Lynx says.

"It's not the kett themselves, do you think?" Crux muses. "But then, why be coy about it?"

"We could try springing the trap," Derc suggests. "Pretend we're bringing them in, set up a meeting and see who shows up."

"Why risk it?" Keema says. "If anyone wants to come after us, they can hunt us down themselves. Let's not go about making their job easier."

-

A few days later, over dinner, Nakamoto says, "I've been keeping in touch with the Resistance doctors who treated Sara on Voeld."

Scott and Sara are noticeably absent from the table, the latter having gone to bed early after being cranky all day and complaining of a headache, and the former to sit with her until she falls asleep.

"Using a secure comm line, I hope," Keema says.

"Of course. They say that many of their people who were taken have come back with memory problems and unstable emotional states before, but none have presented with anything as severe or prolonged as what Sara's been experiencing."

"I doubt many of their people were personally interrogated by the Archon and kept on ice until he needed them," Lynx points out. "That'd mess anyone up."

"Right, which is why I want to do some scans."

"Can't you get the Resistance to send you theirs?" Keema asks. "Just wait until we've parked somewhere so we don't get hit with inter-system data charges."

"The angara don't have the right equipment. We need to go to a human facility."

"What, like, back to Netiquur?" Crux asks. "We're wanted criminals there, remember?"

"Everywhere, by now," Reyes adds. Even without the sophisticated relay system set up in the Milky Way over the course of millennia, news still travels around Heleus quickly enough.

"I haven't forgotten," Nakamoto says. "Besides, a remote outpost like the one on Netiquur won't have the right equipment either. I need a highly specialised neuroimager that can map the brain's neural pathways. There's one at the hospital on Tianfei Station."

"You're shitting me," Reyes exclaims.

"Tianfei Station?" Keema asks. "We've not been there before, have we?"

"No, because it's in the Zheng He system, also home to the Nexus."

"Ah."

"Exactly."

Keema turns to Nakamoto. "The answer is no."

"Look, it could—" Nakamoto begins.

"A scan, you said?" Keema interrupts. "So it's not even a cure. I'm not going to put our ship and crew at risk for some pictures; you'll have to find another way."

"Putting aside the fact that this could potentially help tens of thousands of people across the cluster, Tianfei Hospital serves as a front-line trauma centre, making it probably the most well-stocked hospital outside of the Nexus. All I need is half an hour inside with Sara, and the rest of you can use that time to take whatever you like."

"It's insanity, is what it is," Reyes says. "Even though we gave the Alliance fake names, our faces are still in their databases, and we're going to be caught the moment we walk in the door."

"Not as quickly as you might think. Unless there's been some great development in facial recognition software in the last ten years, which I highly doubt, the technology we left the Milky Way with isn't advanced enough to make accurate comparisons of targets on the move. And even under the best of conditions, that is, with a stationary user under direct lighting, it still makes too many false positives and negatives to be really useful in active surveillance."

"And you know this how?"

"I used to work in a hospital that was trialling the software. It was meant to scan visitors at patients' doors and only let in those on a pre-approved list, but it turns out there's really no substitute for organic eyes."

"But even hospitals have security guards. Like you said, a lot of valuable equipment and medicine worth stealing."

"Yes, but in emergency admissions, those guards are mainly there to keep out violent criminals, not thieves. Beyond the usual scans for weapons, explosives, and prohibited substances, they're not interested in looking too closely at faces. And they look even less closely if you look like you belong there."

"I see where this is going, but there's no way we're all going to be able to pull off playing doctors."

"We don't all have to. I have something in mind. You'll like it; it involves both vehicular and identity theft."

"I love it already," Reyes says. "We'll make an outlaw of you yet."

-

For being their token honest man, Nakamoto has quite the criminal mind. Derc and Crux hunt down a forger for ID badges while Reyes and Lynx repaint one of the shuttles to make it a spitting image of an Alliance medevac shuttle, complete with scratches and scorch marks to lend credibility to their claim of having just flown in from the front lines. Nakamoto gets the unenviable task of convincing Scott and Sara that this is the best course of action to take after having just narrowly escaped from the Alliance, but it _was_ his idea in the first place, and the heist is going ahead even if he can't convince Sara to play along; they've done all this prep already and haven't had a job since Fribourg, which had been over two weeks ago.

In the end, both Scott and Sara show up in the cargo bay as final preparations are getting underway, hospital gowns under their clothes to maintain their cover once they're inside. Nakamoto, Derc, and Lynx are dressed in Alliance uniforms with field medic armbands while Crux is in an Alliance pilot's uniform. _Defiance_ 's usual ground teams have been thrown in disarray since Scott and Sara will be taken to the human wing of the hospital where all the patients and most of the staff will be human, and therefore less likely to recognise Derc and Lynx from the wanted notices by virtue of most species having generally poor recognition of individuals from other species. Reyes is staying behind with Keema in case someone needs to pilot _Defiance_ , and while it makes perfect sense and Reyes would have suggested it himself if Keema hadn't done so first, he _hates_ being left behind, and they can't even stay in radio contact as the risk of being overheard is too high.

"One hour," Keema reminds everyone as Nakamoto preps two syringes of the drug cocktail that'll allow Scott and Sara to get into the hospital disguised as corpses. "If you're not out by then, we're coming in."

It's a tight schedule—fifteen minutes to get in, thirty minutes for everyone to complete their respective tasks, and fifteen minutes to get out—but an hour is already a best-case estimate where no alarms get raised and no authorities alerted. It's not quite the most dangerous job they've gone on—their last ill-fated job for the Resistance takes the honour—but it's right up there on the list.

-

It's nothing short of agony to sit on the bridge in the dark—both literally and figuratively, as _Defiance_ 's main systems have been powered down—with no idea of how the others are faring on their missions.

"Nineteen minutes," Reyes murmurs after checking his omni-tool.

"Great," Keema replies, "an entire minute has passed since you last saw fit to inform me of the time. Whatever would I do without this information."

Reyes huffs and slouches down in the pilot's chair. He watches out the front of the bridge window as a medevac shuttle docks in bay three and paramedics jump out, wheeling two gurneys into the hospital. After the flurry of activity dies down, Reyes checks his omni-tool again.

"Twenty-eight minutes."

"We might as well have some tea while we're waiting for the others to get back, don't you think?" Keema fixes Reyes with a stare. "Why don't you go make some?"

"What if—"

"I'll press this button, like you've told me ten times already."

Reyes had mapped an override for _Defiance_ 's usual startup sequence to a single button in case they need to make a hasty getaway and he's not around to go through the motions, but, "That's for emergencies only."

"We'll have an emergency alright if you don't stop pestering me. Go. Use the medbay kitchenette; the walk will do you good."

Reyes hates to admit that Keema knows him better than he knows himself sometimes, but the walk to the other end of the ship and back and the familiar motions of making tea helps soothe the churning in his stomach. The bitterness of the tea—an angaran favourite, and Lynx likes it too, but the rest of the crew can't stand it—also gives him something else to complain about besides not knowing what's going on inside the hospital.

At fifty-eight minutes, two paramedics wheeling a gurney each load into the shuttle in bay two. Most likely Lynx and Derc, though Reyes didn't get his binoculars up in time to be sure, and they wouldn't risk making some kind of signal before time's up.

Two more minutes tick by, and no one else approaches the shuttle in bay two. Reyes puts _Defiance_ into low-power mode and tunes the radio to the hospital's emergency frequency. No alarms or other signs that they're aware of a security breach, so there's still hope that Scott, Sara, and Nakamoto are just lost or otherwise delayed in getting to the shuttle.

At one hour and ten minutes, Crux exits the shuttle, followed by Derc and Lynx.

"What are you doing?" Reyes mutters, binoculars jammed up to his eyes.

"What is it?" Keema looks up from her omni-tool.

"They're not following the plan." Reyes' free hand hovers indecisively over the button to activate the comms.

"We're about to have bigger problems than that." Keema nudges Reyes' arm, none too gently.

He keeps the binoculars trained on Crux, Lynx, and Derc until they disappear back into the hospital, then looks over at where Keema's pointing.

A kett shuttle has just landed on the roof of the hospital.

"Shit." Reyes reaches for the comm button again, but Keema grabs his wrist.

"Not until we know what's going on," she says, tuning the radio with her other hand.

"They must be working on a secure channel, or we would have heard something by now."

"We're two people in a cargo ship against a station full of Alliance and who knows how many kett. We've got six crew and one of our shuttles down there, and if possible, I'd like all of them back. We're not going to achieve that by storming in ourselves."

"Captain, you there?" The comms crackle to life with Crux's voice.

"Here," Keema replies. "What is it?"

"We appear to have kett."

"Yes, we saw the shuttle. Is everyone there with you?"

"No, we're going after the others now. Would be great if you could get us some floor plans for the place."

"Stand by."

Keema waves a hand at Reyes, and he passes her the binoculars before connecting his omni-tool to the hospital's network and downloading a map that he sends to Crux. They'd put the backdoor into place before enacting the plan, but it'd been a last-resort action as the location of the download can easily be traced even with just a few seconds' connection time.

"Initiating startup sequence," Reyes informs Keema. They don't want to start _Defiance_ prematurely and alert the station to their presence, but once the Alliance pinpoints their position, the window for escape will only be seconds long.

Keema makes a noise of acknowledgement and relays to Crux the location of an Alliance shuttle that's touching down in a landing bay on the other side of the hospital.

"No sweat," Crux replies. "Stand by."

Down below, lights across half of the hospital go out. A few flicker back on, not as bright as they'd been before, and tuning the radio back to the staff channel confirms part of the hospital is now running off backup power. There's still no mention of the arrival of the kett or the Alliance, but it might just be that they're common enough sights around the station that they don't warrant special attention.

It takes fourteen minutes for hospital security to trace the download, twelve seconds for Reyes to finish _Defiance_ 's startup sequence, and six seconds to get her in the air. There's still no word from Crux, but the shuttle sits untouched in bay two, and neither the kett nor Alliance shuttles are getting ready to take off.

It's been a long time since Reyes has been at _Defiance_ 's helm as a proper pilot, not just hands on the controls and a warm body in the pilot's chair until Derc gets back, but the motions come back to him without a second thought, and she moves just as smoothly as he remembers, even in the tight space and artificial atmo of the station.

"Transport ship _Providence_ , stand down!" a security officer demands over the speakers mounted throughout the station. "You are under arrest for unauthorised access of classified data. Turn yourself in or you will be shot down!"

Out the bridge window, Reyes can see the station's guns priming to fire.

"Give the man what he wants," Keema says.

"Just what I was thinking."

Reyes flashes _Defiance_ 's rear lights in acknowledgement of the order and starts to slow her down, turning back to the hospital and circling it as if looking for a place to land.

"Are they out?" he asks as Keema looks through _Defiance_ 's camera feeds.

"No, not—yes, they're heading for the shuttle."

"All six of them?"

"As far as I can see."

"Returning to base," Crux announces.

Reyes banks left, taking _Defiance_ further down in preparation for allowing the shuttle to dock.

"Land immediately," an officer in the security shuttle on their tail commands.

"Copy that." Reyes brings _Defiance_ in for an apparent landing on the hospital roof—both kett and Alliance shuttles are still parked there, but there's more than enough room for _Defiance_ as well—then pulls up sharply the moment he feels Crux docking the shuttle in its bay. "Derc, get up here now!" Reyes shouts into the intercom.

The security shuttle fires on the back of _Defiance_ with its plasma guns, and one shot hits the side of her tail before Reyes can manoeuvre out of its way. He yells in sync with the warning beep from the console to his right, then flicks the switch to turn it off so there won't be any distractions; he doesn't need the onboard computer to know what's wrong with his ship.

"The station's guns have targeted us," Keema says, looking at screens on the co-pilot's side. "We need to get out of range, quickly."

"I'm working on it." Reyes hits the intercom button again and fumbles at his seatbelt with his other hand. "Derc!"

"Here." Derc stumbles over the threshold of the bridge and makes his way to the pilot's chair.

Reyes relinquishes his seat, but waves Keema down when she makes to stand up.

"I need a co-pilot," Derc says.

"You can have Crux." Reyes catches himself on the door frame as Derc drops _Defiance_ into a nosedive. "Keema, I need Lynx in the engine room."

Keema pages Crux and Lynx over the intercom while Reyes alternates between stumbling his way to the back of the ship and being thrown down corridors and into walls. Every time they get into these kinds of situations, he thinks about installing inertial dampeners throughout the ship, but whenever they land somewhere with the necessary parts and he looks at their credits after refuelling, restocking, and repairs, it all seems like a distant dream.

Lynx is already down in engineering by the time Reyes makes his way there, preparing the getaway they'd used on Elaaden when the kett had been after them.

"This is what you wanted to do, right?" Lynx calls up to him, not pausing as she loosens the control valve on the fuel lines.

"You read my mind." Reyes leaves her to it and starts up the drive core in preparation to jump to FTL. "How goes getting off the station?" he asks Derc as he switches on the rear cameras to check on their pursuit.

"Not good; the guns have a lock on us, and I'm barely able to keep them from firing by staying close to the buildings. _Defiance_ was not built for this kind of flying."

"We're working on it."

The camera feed blacks out as Lynx vents thick smoke behind them, with occasional flashes of light as strips of aluminium scattered to confuse the guns' tracking systems fly past the cameras.

"Derc, how are we looking?" Reyes asks.

"Pulling up now, get ready to jump to FTL."

From the sounds the drive core is making, it's just seconds away from being at full power. Perfect timing.

"Ready when you are."

The station's guns have lost their lock on _Defiance_ , but someone must be at manual controls, because one last barrage goes off before she leaves the station's atmosphere. A few of the bullets connect, nothing vital since no warning lights come on, but Reyes is already counting up the cost of repairs in his head. As they rise up above the station, Lynx cuts off the fuel being pumped into the vents, and they break through the cloud of smoke just before Derc engages the drive core and gets them into FTL.

Reyes and Lynx exchange collective sighs of relief as the gunfire and the whines of the engines are replaced by the comforting thrum of the drive core.

"Everyone to the galley," Keema says over the intercom.

-

Reyes and Lynx set things to rights first, and by the time they get to the galley, everyone else is already there with two large boxes full of medical supplies spread out across the table.

"We've got four more boxes like this in the medbay," Crux says.

"Some of it we'll want to keep, but the rest can be sold off rather easily." Nakamoto looks distracted, paging through something on his omni-tool. "Of course, you should look over it first for any identifying marks. There'll be no hiding that some of it is Alliance made, but you might not want to tip them off too soon."

"What about the other reason we were at the hospital?" Keema asks.

"I'll get back to you on that."

Keema looks at Scott and Sara, cuddled together on the couch in the corner, but they're similarly tight-lipped.

"So, what went wrong?" she asks.

"An unfortunate encounter with the single security guard in the entire hospital that happened to look through the window in the door to the imaging suite and recognised Scott." Nakamoto gives Scott a dry look and Scott shrugs helplessly in return.

"Then what happened?"

"He made a call."

"We were monitoring the hospital's channels and we didn't pick up anything," Reyes interjects.

"A personal call, I suspect. He was likely hoping to claim the bounty on us without having to share with his coworkers."

"You couldn't have stopped him?" Keema asks. "This is two times in a row that the Alliance has caught us doing something they don't like. The bounty is going to go up, and our troubles with it."

"By the time we realised, it was too late to subdue him."

Of course Nakamoto with his oath to 'do no harm' and Scott's propensity to talk first and shoot later would mean that neither of them had thought to just shoot the guy to stop him from running his mouth. Otherwise, they might have managed to get in and out cleanly with the score of a lifetime.

The flat stare Keema's giving an inattentive Nakamoto and a sheepish Scott says she's thinking the same thing, but they've known Nakamoto long enough to know that he won't budge on this issue, and Scott's shaping up to be similarly stubborn.

"Fine " Keema concedes. "We're on our way to Layan now for repairs, and we'll deal with whatever comes of this when it comes, as we do."

While the others hit the showers, Reyes follows Scott down to the passenger cabins and waits in the hallway as Scott coaxes Sara into her bed. She looks exhausted, and hadn't made so much as a peep during the debriefing.

"Did something else happen in the hospital?" Reyes asks once the door to Sara's room closes behind Scott.

"She had some issues with the imaging equipment; I think it reminded her of whatever the Archon did. We managed to get past it eventually, but…it's been a long day."

"And it's not even noon."

Well, it'd been late afternoon on the station, but by _Defiance_ 's internal time cycle, it's not quite eleven in the morning.

Scott chuckles. "Yeah. Some days are just like that, huh? I still can't believe we managed to get away."

"I told you we could handle ourselves. We haven't taken a risk this big in a while, but sometimes the big risks do reap big rewards."

They go up to the shuttle where two crates of stolen drugs are still in the back, hundreds of bottles and boxes with their names and ingredients printed in no fewer than three languages, and a system of symbols on each indicating which species its contents are safe to use on.

"Who's going to buy all this?" Scott asks.

"Outposts are always short on supplies, but if they're too afraid to take in stolen Alliance goods, there's always the Resistance. The price won't be nearly as good though, especially since there's no guarantee of any of this working on angarans. I suppose we could also reach out to some fences we know, provided we can trust them not to turn us in for the bounty. And if we get _really_ desperate, Elaaden."

"So, we're good?"

"For what?"

Scott grimaces instead of answering straight away.

"The hospital?" Reyes guesses.

"I shouldn't have let that guard get away. He really wasn't that quick, I could've gotten to him before he made that call. And now the Alliance knows we were on the station, and we were only there in the first place because you were trying to help Sara…We just keep making trouble for you, don't we?"

"First of all, nobody died and nobody got hurt, which already makes this job not as bad as…oh, about half of the jobs we've ever done. Second of all, in about a third of those jobs, I was the one responsible for everything going south, and the crew haven't thrown me off the ship yet." Of course, Reyes does own _Defiance_ , but it's not relevant to the story he's about to tell. He throws an arm around Scott's shoulders. "On Elaaden, there's a region called the Sea of Ataraxia, and just like the sea, it's real easy to get turned around there when everything looks the same…"

-

The next morning, Nakamoto calls the crew—excluding Scott and Sara—down to the medbay.

"So, what's the verdict?" Reyes asks.

"Well, I'm no neuroscientist, but it's quite clear that something was done to Sara, and I'm not so sure the Archon is entirely to blame." Nakamoto brings up a holographic display, the lights forming a shape that looks vaguely like a brain. "Retrieving a memory from long-term storage involves revisiting the nerve pathways that your brain formed when encoding the memory in the first place. In Sara's case, when I asked her a question about being on Eos, which we know she's been to before, the pathways lit up for a few milliseconds, barely long enough for the imager to record it, then shorted out."

Reyes can feel his eyes glazing over. "I thought you said you weren't a neuroscientist."

"I read a book," Nakamoto says coolly.

"I read," Reyes protests. He prefers watching vids as a method of unwinding, but trashy romance novels are the way to go when he needs to devote most of his attention to keeping watch or overseeing a process. He also spends a lot of time reading manuals and spec sheets for various parts he'd one day like to install on _Defiance_.

"Well, given that none of us have read any books on neuroscience recently, would you care to explain to us what this means?" Keema asks.

"I think someone's deliberately hidden these memories. Maybe as a defence mechanism against the Archon's interrogations."

"Right, can't tell the kett anything if you don't remember," Reyes says.

"Who'd have the technology?" Crux asks. "Not the Alliance, surely."

"Not the angara," Keema adds. "The Resistance would be the first to know about a development like this, and with Sara out of the Archon's reach, they wouldn't have any reason to continue hiding the memories."

"Well, whoever it was, there was something that someone wanted to hide, and it's concentrated on that six-month period between Sara starting that new job she didn't tell her brother about, and getting captured by the kett. But the process appears to have been done in a rush, which I suspect is responsible for a large number of other long-term memories also being affected," Nakamoto explains.

"But she's been remembering," Reyes points out. "Things from her childhood, how to shoot a gun."

"The latter is likely to be muscle memory. As for the former, since the removal process wasn't targeting those memories, it makes sense that they would return with relative ease. The operative word here being 'relative'."

"What about the other memories?" Keema asks. "Do you think they're worth retrieving?"

"I think that someone went to a lot of trouble to hide something from the Archon."

"Something that could help us fight him?" Crux ventures.

Nakamoto shrugs. "I can't say."

"We should at least try, shouldn't we? What's the best way of helping Sara get those memories back?"

"We could go to Eos." Scott's voice joins them from the doorway.

"How long have you been there?" Reyes asks.

"Long enough." Scott steps through into the galley. "I think the point where Sara's memories start blanking out for good starts somewhere on the Nexus, but there's no use in going there if we don't even know what we're looking for. The only other place I know for sure she's been is Eos. Maybe going back there will trigger something."

Everyone looks at Nakamoto, who shrugs again. "I'm not a neuroscientist."

"Keep at those books," Keema says. "Derc, chart a course to Eos."

Keema leaves the medbay and Reyes follows. She knows him too well, because instead of returning to her quarters, she goes to the engine room and waits there for him, arms crossed and an expectant look on her face.

"This is not our fight," Reyes says after closing the door behind him. "We gave that up long ago."

"No, we didn't. Giving up would have meant turning Scott and Sara over to Vehn instead of shooting him."

"Well, he did shoot me and threaten the rest of the crew. Maybe if he'd tried asking nicely first, things would've ended differently."

"What about Elaaden? Voeld? Fribourg? Netiquur? We've had ample opportunity to rid ourselves of our passengers. The last one was your idea, remember?"

"There's a big difference between choosing not to throw people to the kett and actively seeking out ways to undermine them."

"And if Sara really is the key to driving the kett out of Heleus? Should we let that slip through our hands?"

"No, but that sounds like something that's a lot more up the Resistance's alley than ours."

"You fought to keep her out of Resistance hands once."

"Not so much fought as I wanted to give her a choice."

"She chose to stay, and now she's part of the crew. Do we not help our own?"

Reyes lets out a heavy exhale and leans back against a console. She's got him there; their top priorities on this ship are each other, then _Defiance_. If helping Sara means going to Eos, then they go to Eos.

"First Nakamoto with Tianfei and now you with Eos. I'm starting to feel like the only sane person on this ship."

"I'll make sure to remind you that you said that the next time _you_ come up with a stupid plan."

"Just make sure Sara's on board with this," Reyes says as Keema leaves with a smug grin.


	9. Forerunner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Defiance_ returns to the ruins of Prodromos where Sara's troubles began.

The desert sand is black with scorch marks where Prodromos once stood, all the way to where Promise and Resilience had been founded. It looks like no one's made efforts to reclaim the land in the months since the bombing, and even the hardy plants that can survive Eos' radiation levels haven't grown back in.

The kett have designated the whole area off-limits, even for air traffic, and Reyes, Derc, and Keema are seeing this through one of _Defiance_ 's external cameras pointed towards Prodromos and zoomed in as they cruise by at a leisurely speed from a safe distance.

"No cover at all," Reyes laments, trying to think of a way they can sneak in to do some investigation. It's already going to be hard enough with only two EVA suits on _Defiance_ capable of withstanding the radiation for more than a few minutes at a time. The shuttles are fully environmentally sealed, but it'll be difficult to do any sort of close examination without leaving them.

"No shields either," Keema says. "We should try to gather more information, but I suspect all we'll have to contend with is passive surveillance and the occasional patrol."

"What are you thinking? A single shuttle, under the cover of darkness?" Reyes gives the idea some more thought. "What if they've left sensors?"

"Does that scrambler of yours still work?"

-

They make port at Ananeosi, an outpost west of Prodromos beyond the Presson Dunes, just far enough that the Sheartop can't be seen on the horizon. The Alliance didn't _have_ to rebuild after Prodromos: Eos doesn't have many resources worth claiming beyond where mining outposts have already been set up, so this new outpost is strictly for show, which makes it the most dangerous place on the planet for a ship full of fugitives to be. And yet, here they are.

They'd made a detour to Faroang earlier to pick up fifty crates of textiles that they unload at the docks, and they're scheduled to take on another delivery to Zaubray that will most certainly not be reaching its intended destination. They've purposely arrived a day early for the pickup, to give _Defiance_ a plausible reason to remain in the outpost overnight while they're out sifting through the ruins of Prodromos.

Only Crux, Lynx, and Derc venture into the outpost since Scott and Sara's faces are plastered on wanted notices on nearly every billboard, Keema's angaran, and Reyes is too widely known for him to risk being seen. Still, even hidden away on the ship, it makes Reyes uneasy to be around so many uniformed Alliance personnel. It's somehow even worse than Tianfei Station, maybe because of all the kett milling about the place free as they please, seemingly wandering around with no purpose. It must be leisure day at the local kett garrison or something.

"The bartender I spoke to said the kett usually come through the outpost every other week or so," Derc says when he returns from his intel-gathering mission at the bar.

"Just to remind everybody who's really in charge around here," Reyes mutters as he watches the kett through the bridge windows. They're all armed and armoured—he doesn't think he's ever seen a kett not be either—and considerably outnumber the Alliance guards on patrol.

"That's good," Keema says.

Reyes and Derc look at her in surprise.

"They're not here because of us," she clarifies.

"That we know of." Reyes goes back to looking out the window.

"We know how to deal with kett."

"Keep your wits about you and always have an exit strategy," Derc helpfully offers up.

"Exactly. Now get to work; there's a lot still to be done before night falls."

-

Flying after dark is restricted to pre-approved vehicles only, but they don't want to draw attention to _Defiance_ so Derc acquires another shuttle that's already been cleared to leave. He gets the pilot drunk then into _Defiance_ 's medbay where Nakamoto keeps him under sedation until they can return him to his shuttle.

Derc takes the pilot's place and Reyes, Scott, and Sara stow away in the back. They can't keep an open line with _Defiance_ because of the scrambler that's hiding the fact they're deviating from the shuttle's planned course, so Reyes has clipped a camera to the front of one of the EVA suits to record everything for Keema to go over later.

He climbs into the co-pilot's chair after they leave Ananeosi even though there's no co-piloting to do, and takes in the view of what had once been the Initiative's best hope for survival. Site 1 had failed because they hadn't prepared enough, but Site 2, Resilience, was to have been their new beginning. Then the kett had attacked, and with that heaped on the other challenges the planet had thrown at them, their troubles had seemed insurmountable.

Prodromos had been a joint effort between the kett and the newly-formed Alliance, and it went up with an ease that was a slap in the face to all the colonists who'd struggled and died for the other two outposts. Reyes had only been there once, in the early days when security hadn't been as tight, but other than its symbolic value, he can't remember there being anything else there worth blowing up.

"Hell of a place," Derc murmurs as he circles the basin.

"Could've been home," Reyes says.

"Not for me. I was always meant to be out amongst the stars."

"Me too. But even with how Prodromos came to be, it was still a sign that we were going to make it after all."

Derc sets the shuttle down in the middle of the basin, and Reyes and Sara head out wearing the EVA suits. They're keeping as low a profile as they can so they're not using torches and have to rely on the light of the moon to guide them through the debris, but at least Sara doesn't seem inclined to go far.

"Feel anything?" Reyes asks after giving her a few minutes to look around. He'd be surprised if she does, since the place is little more than a crater now. He can barely remember what the outpost had looked like before.

"No, except that it's creepy here. Let's go." Sara gingerly picks her way back to the shuttle as if the dirt was made from the ashes of the dead.

And it may well be; the area has been so thoroughly bombed that only fragments remain of even the largest structures, and any living beings caught in the blast wouldn't have stood a chance. The winds of the fierce storms Eos is famous for should have scattered their remains by now, but with the thought fresh in his mind, Reyes also treads a little lighter.

They go to Promise next, which Sara pokes around longer. It's no less obliterated than Prodromos, but it'd already been abandoned by the time it was levelled, and the weight of death doesn't linger in the air here.

"Anything?" Reyes asks when Sara stops, perched atop a mound of rubble that might have once been a building.

"I can't remember." It's hard to see Sara's face through the helmet, but she sounds troubled.

"Should we move on?"

All that's left now is Resilience, then the expanse of desert that lies between the two sites and Prodromos. They've still got most of the night, but it won't be enough time if they have to comb over every grain of sand for a clue as to what Sara had been doing here six months ago.

"Can we walk? I remember walking."

"Around here?"

"No, across the desert. Towards…" Sara looks to the south-west. "Something was there." She turns to the south. "Or there?"

"Can we take the shuttle?" Reyes asks. Walking to the top of the ridge Sara had been looking at will take them at least half an hour. Out to the middle of the desert? It could take all night; it's hard to judge distances in the dark with no distinguishing landmarks for reference.

Sara ignores him and starts walking.

Reyes sighs. "Don't go too far, I'll be back!" he calls after her. They can't use the comms to contact the shuttle because of the scrambler, so he needs to physically go back and update Derc. "We're taking a walk. Set down on that ridge and wait for us."

"Did she remember something?" Scott asks.

Reyes makes a noise of frustration. "Who knows? But it's all we've got right now." He runs off after Sara, who's reached the edge of the outpost by the time he catches up.

Sara doesn't offer anymore insight into what this area used to be like, and Reyes doesn't press for details even though he's got to wonder at the piles of debris he can see at the bottom of the steep drop to their left. Had someone been living out here?

The top of the ridge is a crumbled mess. The shuttle is waiting for them on the other side of the gaping hole in the path where something had obviously once been, and there's enough of the path left along the base of the cliff for Reyes and Sara to cross safely, but Sara's more interested in what's at the bottom of the hole.

She jumps down before Reyes can warn her to be careful, and her landing is followed by a rumbling sound as the debris shifts under her weight. Reyes jumps down after her without a second thought; Scott would likely be out for murder if something happened to Sara while he'd entrusted her to someone else's care.

Luckily for Reyes, Sara seems to be unharmed, jumping down even further to get to the ground. Their jump-jets soften the landing, but Reyes has no idea how they're going to get back up.

"Remnant were here," Sara says, a hand outstretched towards the rubble and glowing electric blue.

"We're not going to have any of that." Reyes places a hand on her arm. "Someone might see the light. We'll take some pictures and scans instead and look over them on the ship."

Sara's not entirely happy with his suggestion, but she puts her biotics away and doesn't go anywhere while Reyes makes a record of anything that looks promising. When he's done, he turns around to find Sara staring out into the open desert.

"Ready to go?" he asks.

"Something's missing," she says, a frown audible in her voice.

"You can look for it from the shuttle. Come on, we're burning night here."

-

Derc starts taking them south-west, towards where Sara had indicated before, but before they take off, she shouts, "Wait!" and Derc lets the engine throttle down.

"We went that way next." Sara points towards the south-east. "In a truck."

"Who were you with?" Scott asks.

Sara thinks about it for a moment. "Don't know," she eventually says. "But I was driving."

"You can't drive."

The two of them have an argument in the back over Sara's driving skills or lack thereof as Derc brings the shuttle back up and follows the cliff until they come to another pile of rubble, this one much bigger than the last.

"Is this the place?" Derc asks over his shoulder.

Sara squeezes into the cockpit and looks out the front window. "Could be."

"Time to go for another walk?" Reyes asks.

They're above a plateau that might have once been connected to the mainland, but now it's half the height of the cliffs they'd come down from, and the ruins have reached an unsteady equilibrium over the last six months that the shuttle disturbs when it lands on top.

"Is this going to hold?" Scott asks as he grabs the railing along the inside of the shuttle to keep from falling over.

"We shouldn't fall very far if it doesn't," Derc says. "As long as we're not loading cargo and you two are careful getting in and out, I think we'll be okay," he tells Reyes and Sara.

"That doesn't sound safe."

"Sit down and strap in if you're worried. We'll be fine."

Reyes and Sara leave the precariously-parked shuttle to take a look around. A much larger structure had been here than at the last spot if the piles of rubble are anything to go by, but Reyes can already pick out pieces of remtech, powered down but bearing the distinctive etching of other pieces he'd seen before.

"Kett were here," Sara says as she examines a large curved strut sticking out of the ground.

"They had a building here?" Reyes joins her to catalogue the debris. "The kett do seem fond of remnant structures." They're specific about it, though: they'd left the downed starship on Elaaden to the scavengers, but Reyes remembers them fiercely guarding some kind of pillar on Havarl. Maybe something similar had been here?

"There was…" Sara looks up, craning her neck to look at the sky. "I can't remember." She lets her head drop.

"Hey." Reyes places a tentative hand on her back. "You're doing great. I know things don't make sense right now, but we'll gather as much information as we can and try to piece it together once we're back on the ship with the others."

"There were three." Sara straightens up.

"Where's the third?"

"Doesn't matter, it's the same. It's the fourth one that's important."

That makes no sense to Reyes, but they get back in the shuttle anyway, and Sara directs Derc back to the area she'd been looking at before.

A lake had once been here—now little more than a rough depression in the landscape—and on the far side had been Resilience. Sara's adamant that there's something in the area worth investigating, but they do circle after circle of the area and can't find anything out of the ordinary.

It's still more than four hours until the sun will start coming up, so Reyes is about to suggest they park right in the centre and walk for a while when a flash of light appears on the horizon. They all freeze and watch the light for a few seconds.

"It's coming closer," Reyes says. "We need to get to cover, now."

They retreat to the cliffs in the north-east, and Derc hides the shuttle in a cave that turns out to be a kaerkyn nest. There's no way the insects can get through to the shuttle's interior, but Reyes has to admit it's unsettling listening to their legs scuttling over the outside, claws scratching on the metal.

"How long do we have to stay here?" Scott asks, looking up at the ceiling like he can see through it.

"No idea," Derc says. "Our usual instruments aren't working because of the scrambler. We'll be safe from discovery as long as we have it on, though."

"Unless they saw us come in here." Reyes is looking out the cockpit window through a pair of binoculars, but the mouth of the cave limits his field of view, and he can't see anything except darkness. "Bring us out a bit, would you?" he asks Derc.

"If the shuttle's still patrolling the area, they'll be able to detect the heat from the engine. And if they come to investigate, they'll be able to see us in the cave."

"Fine, I'll go out."

Reyes opens the shuttle door, and no fewer than four kaerkyn manage to scurry in through the gap before he hurriedly pulls the door shut. The shuttle lights up in blue as Sara captures their intruders in a singularity, then there's a crunching sound followed by unpleasant squishing as the kaerkyn explode. Reyes and Sara are still in the EVA suits and Derc is hidden behind the back of the pilot's chair, but Scott has no such protection. He glares at Sara, who only shrugs in return.

"Guess we're staying put 'til daylight," Derc says.

-

They set back down at Ananeosi an hour after dawn, and Derc feeds the docks manager a story about getting lost and being attacked by wild animals as his reason for turning back. The scuff marks on the shuttle back him up, and the docks manager notes down the incident and gives him clearance to stay for repairs.

Derc, Reyes, Scott, and Sara exchange places with the original pilot, who will wake up in the cockpit in an hour with no recollection of how he got there and how his shuttle came to be so beat up.

Back on _Defiance_ , Scott heads straight for a shower while Reyes uploads the pictures he'd taken to a holoprojector in the galley, and the rest of the crew gather around to see the extent of the destruction the Alliance had wrought on their own outpost.

"That's remtech all right," Keema says, zooming in on one of the many pictures of debris.

"And that's kett architecture," Crux says, choosing another picture. "You said they were in the same place?"

"Right on top of each other," Reyes confirms. "Whatever remnant structure had been nearby, it looked like the kett had built something right up against it."

"We saw something like that on Voeld: a huge remnant pillar out in the ice fields, with a kett encampment surrounding it. The Resistance thought they were using it as a power source."

"There's one on Havarl, too. And at least two on Kadara. One's even right outside the port."

"But why would the kett blow up their own facility?" Lynx asks. "If something happened in Prodromos or Promise or Resilience, why level the entire basin?"

"Sara thought she'd been somewhere else, in the middle of where the lake used to be," Reyes says. "But we saw a ship headed our way and left before we could investigate."

"We're not cleared to stay another night," Keema says, "and we don't want to risk it without being sure we'll find something."

Sara, back from wherever she'd gone, places something in the middle of the dining table. It's the piece of remtech Scott and Keema had received from the colonists on Elaaden.

"They're supposed to look like that," Sara says, "but they're not working anymore."

The lines on the piece of remtech glow blue then fade away, repeating on a cycle every few seconds.

"What's not working?" Crux asks.

"Those." Sara points at the pictures of remtech debris.

"They're not glowing, sure, but what were they? What did they do?"

"I don't know."

"If you want to see working remnant pillars," Keema cuts in, "we should make for Kadara. No kett or Alliance to disturb us there."

-

The rest of the crew take care of trading and resupplying while Reyes takes Scott and Sara to the remnant pillar just outside Kadara port. It's a tourist attraction of sorts, so they won't draw too much attention going straight there from the docks, but just to be on the safe side, Reyes gives Scott and Sara a tour of the slums first. They stop by the shipping crate Nakamoto works out of when he's down here, then swing by Tartarus to say hello to Kian, who mixes them some drinks and gives Scott and Sara a quizzical look, but doesn't press the matter when Reyes shakes his head.

From Tartarus, it's a natural progression to the guardhouse, where Reyes signs them out using fake names for Scott and Sara, then they spend some time looking at the sulphur pools where water is pumped from before being carefully filtered to supply the port. The remnant pillar is right in front of them at the top of a hill, and from what Reyes can see, no one else is currently up there.

The three of them climb up the path to the sheltered cove created by three smaller pillars leaning inwards over a console of remnant design. There are years-old signs of a fight, probably between scavengers and whatever had been set to guard the site, but there's not even a scrap of metal left behind now.

"Sara?" Reyes asks.

She hasn't stepped up onto the platform containing the console yet, but is walking the perimeter, looking up at the smaller pillars and lightly running her fingers over their surface.

"Anything?" Scott asks.

Sara declines to answer in favour of approaching the console and placing her hand on it. The three of them wait in quiet anticipation, but nothing happens.

"Hm." Sara looks up at the largest pillar, then back down at the console. She runs her fingers over different sections of it. "It feels…I've seen one before."

"You may well have, if the destroyed remnant structures on Eos were anything like this one," Reyes says. "But what were you doing there?"

"I can't remember." Sara kicks the console sullenly. "I remember the desert. There was walking, driving, there were other people. We went to a few places. Places like this, maybe. They feel important, but I can't remember why."

"There have been many theories about the remnant dating back to the first time the angara discovered them. But no one's been able to make their tech work except to strip it down to its components and repurpose them."

"Maybe I did." Sara rounds on Scott. "You said I did research."

"Into biotics and implants and stuff, not the remnant," Scott says. "At least, I didn't think you were. There were a few months before the kett took you where you wouldn't tell me what you were working on, but I like to think you would have told me if you were looking into the remnant. I might even have come."

Sara scrunches up her face. "I don't remember."

"Maybe it'll come back to you if hang around a little longer," Reyes suggests. "Take your time, we'll give you some space."

Sara nods and turns her attention back to the console, examining it from the bottom up. Reyes catches Scott's gaze and inclines his head towards the outer pillars.

"So," Reyes says as he leans against the nearest pillar, "are you doing anything later?"

Scott pauses with his hand on the other side of the pillar and looks across at Reyes with a growing smile. "I was thinking of asking a friend out for dinner. Have any recommendations?"

"I know a few places. How many credits are you willing to drop on this dinner?"

"Uh, fifty? We haven't sold much of the medical supplies yet so I don't really have much money."

"That's not going to feed two people very much if you intend on going somewhere nice."

"I was thinking we'd split the bill."

" _Scott_. That's no way to treat your date."

"Who said it was a date?"

"Well, your friend might think so."

"And he'd be right." Scott breaks out into a broad smile.

"I didn't make you pay last time, did I?" Reyes asks.

"Well, you didn't pay either, so to keep things even, I think we should split."

"You know, you—" Reyes breaks off as a sound catches his attention. "Do you hear that?" Without waiting for a reply, he darts out from under the pillars to get a better view of the valley. A vaguely shuttle-shaped silhouette is descending from the sky, headed straight for a flat stretch of the valley floor beneath them. As the shuttle nears, Reyes gets a clearer look at its design and the markings painted on the side. "We need to leave."

"Who is it?" Scott joins him out on the ridge. "Kett? Alliance?"

"No, we're on Kadara, but there are more than two threats in this galaxy, you know." Reyes ushers Scott back to where Sara is looking up curiously from the remnant console.

"Raiders?" Scott continues guessing. "Outlaws?"

"How about an ex that just won't quit?"

"Reyes!" Zia shouts from below as her crew fan out from the shuttle behind her. "I know you're there and I know who you're with! Give them up now and I'll give you a ten-minute head start before I come after you!"

"As tempting as that sounds, I'm going to have to pass!" Reyes shouts back, bringing up his omni-tool to call Keema for help.

"Fifteen minutes, then!" Zia's motioning her crew into position to block both paths coming down from the remnant pillar.

"How about we all go home and pretend we never saw each other?"

Keema finally picks up, turning Reyes' audio transmission request into a vidcall, probably so he can't escape the full brunt of her annoyance. It's been a while since the last time, but this isn't the first occurrence of Zia being a nuisance while they're on Kadara.

"We haven't finished resupplying," Keema says unhurriedly. "You're going to have to…what is it, 'hang tight' for the moment."

"Send someone in a shuttle," Reyes hisses as Zia continues maligning his good character at a volume loud enough for the entire port to hear.

"She'd only give chase and then we'd have to leave in a hurry, and you'll wish we'd finished resupplying when we're stuck between systems with no food or fuel."

"We just need to get back into the port. Then she won't be able to shoot us, and she won't tell everyone about Scott and Sara, because then she'd have to share."

"But she's in league with the Outcasts, isn't she? It's going to be harder to pick you up from jail than from the Badlands."

"It'll be harder still to spring us from whatever secret bunker Zia's operating out of these days while waiting to be sold off to the highest bidder."

"That's not going to happen," Keema says with a put-upon sigh. "Just stay where you are and don't let yourselves get captured." She terminates the call.

"Are they going to get here in time?" Scott asks.

"I'll stall." Reyes sticks his head back out. "Zia! I'll make you a deal."

"You're in no position to be cutting deals, Reyes." Zia's waiting on the valley floor, a rifle in her hands. From the outline, it looks like a Sandstorm; someone's been doing well.

"Oh yeah? Do you think my crew's just going to let this go? You might have the bigger numbers, but I've got the bigger ship. Who do you think will win?"

"They wouldn't dare. Not here."

"Hey, outside the port, anyone's fair game. So you can take your chances, or I can give you the Ryders, and we'll promise not to hunt you down in return for twenty percent of the bounty."

"Hey!" Scott protests in a loud whisper.

"She'd never believe me if I didn't try," Reyes says apologetically.

"You must be joking!" Zia calls up to him. "You hand them over willingly, and I promise to think about not turning _you_ in for the bounty."

"Fifteen percent, then! You'll never get to my ship before it leaves, and if I shoot these two dead, you'll only have me, and I'm worth a lot less than eighty-five percent of their bounty."

"Ten percent, and you and your crew get to leave. But you leave Kadara straight away, and if you come back, you're fair game again, deal?"

"Deal."

"Come on down."

She's almost certainly lying about letting Reyes and _Defiance_ go, but their negotiation has gone on long enough that Reyes can see the familiar outline of one of _Defiance_ 's shuttles circling around from the docking bay.

"I'm coming in," Crux says over the comms. "You ready?"

"Come around from the west," Reyes tells her. There's ever so slightly more shelter on that side than on the eastern approach.

The shuttle quickly picks up speed, and almost manages to touch down on the side of the mountain before Zia's crew realises and starts shooting. Lynx is in the shuttle helping to bolster its shields with a barrier, and once Sara's inside, she lends her skills to the effort, and Crux whisks them all away without so much as a scratch on the shuttle's paint work.

It's a rather tidy extraction if Reyes says so himself, but Zia's still got pull amongst the Outcasts—more now than nine years ago—so Keema recalls the rest of the crew and orders _Defiance_ away from the port as quickly as Derc can bring her up.

-

About half an hour after their hasty departure, Reyes finds himself in the galley with Crux, Lynx, and Scott.

"I can't believe even you would ever take up with someone so crazy," Lynx says as she eats ice cream straight out of the tub, batting Reyes away when he tries to get in a scoop.

"We were all a little crazy back then," he says. "We'd just travelled over six hundred years through dark space to find that the promised land was actually a hellhole."

"Well, her particular brand of crazy has been chasing us for over eight years," Crux points out.

"Only on Kadara, and only if she happens to see me. Well, this bounty changes things a little, but she's not the type of person to chase someone offworld for the Alliance."

"Great," Lynx says, "the one free port in the cluster and we can't go back without being harassed because nine years ago, you couldn't break up properly with your girlfriend."

"She wasn't my girlfriend," Reyes says, but no one's listening to him as they start leaving the galley. "And whatever time we spent together has nothing to do with it!"

He looks to Scott for support, but only gets an amused smile and head shake in response.

Reyes gives up on trying to defend himself and instead sits down heavily on the couch and stretches out. "A pity we didn't get to find out what those remnant pillars were for," he says. "Maybe it's been too long and they don't work anymore. Or maybe all remtech ever does is light up and look pretty." He looks over at the piece Sara had put on the dining table that still sits there, a gently glowing blue centrepiece. "Well, even though Sara didn't turn out to be the saviour of Heleus, you're still crew; that hasn't changed. You can stay as long as you keep helping out on jobs."

Scott nods and comes over to sit on the couch opposite Reyes. "A bigger pity about dinner," he says.

Reyes sighs. "Ah, Zia. She does love to ruin things for me."

"We can still have dinner together if you'd like. It won't be the same, but—"

"Yes, excellent idea." Reyes jumps to his feet. "We can kick Derc off the bridge and sit in the avionics bay together to watch the cosmic rays bounce off the shields on the windows."

"And neither of us will have to pay," Scott says with a laugh.

"It's a date."


	10. The Hunt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> En route to a job, _Defiance_ acquires a tail she just can't shake.

Their destination is set for Havarl to take on another Resistance job, which Reyes hasn't even complained about, yet no one seems to appreciate the incredible amounts of self-restraint he's showing. He'd wanted to go back to Elaaden and take on more freelance smuggling jobs, which is their specialty, and smooth over any feelings that might have been hurt by their abrupt departure last time. But the Resistance had made good on their payment for the last job, so at least he can console himself with credits.

"We've got a tail," Derc announces not long after they drop out of FTL, just to keep things interesting.

Reyes is in his quarters so he gets to the bridge a second before Keema, whose footsteps he can hear coming up from one of the lower decks.

"Alliance?" Keema asks. "What kind of ship?"

"Larger than a fighter, smaller than a frigate, and using some kind of stealth tech, so I can't tell you more," Reyes says, frowning at what the screen's telling him. He puts the information up on a holoscreen so Keema can see it without leaning over his shoulder.

"Could be raiders," Derc says. "Some of them are getting high tech these days."

Kett don't bother with stealth and Alliance ships of this size travel in groups, so a raiding ship does seem to be the most likely suspect.

"They're gaining on us," Derc adds.

"How long until they're within range?" Keema asks.

"Alarmingly soon, but I wouldn't recommend shooting," Reyes says. "Their stealth tech means Crux and Lynx will need to aim manually, which will give the other ship a definite advantage over us in the shooting area."

"Let's make a run for it, then. We don't need trouble so soon after making a clean escape from Eos. And so close to the Resistance, too."

"What about the job?"

"We'll take one on Elaaden." Keema claps a hand on Reyes' shoulder. "Happy now?"

"Ecstatic."

Derc gets them out of the Faroang system and pointed towards Zaubray while Keema informs the crew of their change in plans. Everyone is largely unfazed by the development even though the long jump to Zaubray without being able to resupply on Havarl means they have to ration their food. It's nothing they haven't been able to handle before.

-

Because nothing ever goes according to plan, they've only just landed on Elaaden—not at the Paradise, but a smaller outpost where salvage is processed and prepped for export to other systems—when Derc informs them that their tail is back.

"Same energy signature as the one we saw before," Reyes says as he runs the usual scans.

"How did it follow us through FTL?" Derc asks. "No one has that kind of technology."

"Lucky guess," Reyes proposes. There are really only four major systems within range of Faroang, and since Pytheas and Zheng He are Alliance territory and the angara jealously guard Onaon, it really only leaves Zaubray as a possible destination.

"Food and fuel only, and be quick about it," Keema says to Crux and Lynx over the comms. To Derc, she says, "Set a course for Tecunis. We'll check the ship for trackers on our way there. The crew, too. We don't want to fall for the same trick twice."

The ship and crew come up clean for trackers and transmitters, but still, the mystery ship manages to follow them to Tecunis, and doubts begin to arise about their ability to lose their pursuer.

"Bounty hunters, do you think?" Reyes asks Derc and Keema.

"Do we know anyone else as desperate to get our attention?" Keema asks.

"Oh, look, they're trying to comm us." It's not unusual for raiders and bounty hunters to send taunts or offers for surrender before attempting to board a ship, neither of which Reyes is in the mood to entertain right now, so he doesn't accept the connection.

"Ignore it. We're getting out of here."

-

They get barely a moment to breathe in Dar'Hegah before they're on the run again, making a bigger jump to Sephesa twenty-two hours away. Derc slips _Defiance_ into a debris field around the planet of Chophise which seems to adequately mask their presence long enough to give them time to refuel and resupply at a small scavenger's station—at truly criminal prices, but they have little choice—before their pursuer gets a lock on them again.

They make an even bigger jump this time, fifty hours to Meos, the farthest they can go without the static electricity in the drive core building up to fatal levels.

"What happens if we can't outrun the bounty hunters?" Sara asks at dinner that evening. "Are you going to turn us over?"

"No," Reyes says immediately.

Keema gives him a challenging look.

"I _will_ mutiny," Reyes tells her. "I know how to do that."

"I know," Keema replies. "I was only going to say that while Scott and Sara might be worth the most, the bounty on the rest of us is not so insignificant that any bounty hunters would be willing to just let us go. We're all…what's that saying? In the same boat, whether we like it or not."

"So we'll fight?" Sara asks. "I want a gun."

"No," the crew says in unison.

"If we get boarded, you two hide while the rest of us pretend we dropped you off along the way," Keema says. "It might make them think twice about whether getting into a fight is worth it."

"What about our rooms?" Scott asks.

"Pack all your things into a bag that you can take with you in the event you need to hide. And make your beds when you're not sleeping in them."

"You can hide in engineering," Reyes says. "There's an access hatch near the passenger rooms, and the wall panels are removable if you need to hide behind them. The heat from the engines will hide you from thermal scanners, but you'll probably only be able to stay there for a few minutes before it gets too hot."

"Well, I'll have a gun," Scott says. "I bet I could take out a few if it comes to it."

"I _need_ a gun," Sara stresses. "I'm not going back." As everyone starts to object, she adds, "Not alive."

Chatter around the table dies down.

"We're not going to let them take you, and you're not getting a gun," Keema says firmly, and resumes eating.

No one else dares to continue the discussion, not even Sara, and _that's_ why Keema's the captain: when she talks, people listen.

-

The Scourge is dense in Meos, which is probably why they manage to drift in low-power mode undetected for nearly eight hours before the mysterious ship reappears on the long-range scanner.

Derc pushes _Defiance_ through the Scourge but still the ship follows, and no amount of feinting or evasive action throws it off their scent. Sara's on the bridge too this time, watching anxiously as the little orange dot refuses to drop off the scanner.

After an hour, which is all the fuel they can afford to burn through, Keema calls off the chase and tells Derc to take them back to Sephesa before heading off to find Crux and Lynx to talk gunning strategies. Reyes finishes his diagnostics for the fiftieth time, and finally decides to call it a night and get some sleep.

"I never meant for this to happen," he hears Sara say behind him as she takes his seat in the co-pilot's chair. "When I was a little kid, all I ever dreamed of was going to Mars and digging through the prothean ruins there."

"We're a long way from prothean ruins, Sara Ryder," Derc says, not unkindly.

"Yeah, I know." Sara sighs wistfully. "Sometimes I wish…" She trails off, but Reyes can think of any number of ways to finish her sentence, few of them optimistic. "Nevermind."

Such is the way of dreams.

-

As their arrival in Sephesa draws nearer, they're forced to confront the reality of their situation that they've been ignoring for days. Given their lack of success at losing their pursuit, there are only three real outcomes: the bounty hunters give up and leave them alone, _Defiance_ puts up a fight and wins, or _Defiance_ puts up a fight and loses. Of course, the first outcome would be preferable, or the second, even if they have to starve themselves to afford repairs, but the third is much more likely. They almost unanimously agree with Sara that in the event that happens, they'd rather go down fighting than be taken alive.

The sole exception is Nakamoto, whose skills as a doctor may be enough to save him from the exaltation chamber when the bounty hunters turn them in. That, and the fact that there's no concrete proof of him being a willing participant in any of their extra-legal activities. Even his presence at Tianfei Hospital can be explained away by coercion and self-preservation.

"I'm going to miss you, you miserable bastard," Reyes says as he watches Nakamoto pack the medbay in preparation. He can't take everything if he wants to make a convincingly hasty departure, but there's no sense in leaving expensive supplies behind if no one's going to be around to use them.

"The pleasure was all yours." Nakamoto clicks shut the lid of the case he has before him, and gives Reyes a wry smile.

"Ah, you'll miss us too, don't deny it."

"You're not dead yet."

"Might not be long now," Keema says as she steps through the doorway from the cargo bay. "We'll be back in Sephesa in a few hours."

Crux and Lynx have been training with manual targeting on the guns as best they can with nothing to aim at in FTL, and Reyes has prepped the explosives they'd stocked up on in Voeld. He's going to want to be in the co-pilot's seat for the showdown, not stuck in engineering manually loading and launching missiles because the automatic deployment unit failed to engage.

They come out of FTL in Sephesa right on schedule, and slip into the debris field near Chophise, affixing themselves to the wreck of a hollowed-out ship several magnitudes larger than _Defiance_ , and go into low-power mode with just enough electricity running through the system to get them back up to full power in a fraction of a second.

It doesn't take long for the other ship to reappear on _Defiance_ 's long-range scanner, but their concealment tactic seems to be working because it doesn't head straight for them like it had before.

"They're scanning for us," Derc says. The dot on the scanner starts moving towards them. "And…they've found us."

"That shouldn't be possible," Reyes says. Their own long-range scanner is speckled with noise from the debris field, and he's had to apply at least half a dozen filters to it just to narrow down the results to the hundred or so objects that are on the screen right now. The other ship must be sporting some serious tech to find them in just a single-pass scan.

"Still want to stand and fight?" Derc asks Keema.

"Let's do it," Keema says, her eyes fixed to the holoscreen where Reyes is projecting the scanner results. "Gunners at the ready."

With the targeting computers out of play, Crux and Lynx have to wait until the ship comes within visual range. Reyes puts up the feed from the rear external camera on another screen, and they watch as the other ship deftly spirals out of the line of fire.

"Huh," Reyes says, zooming in on a freeze frame and leaning in to get a closer look. "Huh," he says again, louder.

Keema stops halfway through giving Crux and Lynx the order to take aim again. "What?"

"I do believe that ship's not armed." He puts up the still image he's extracted in front of the camera feed.

"That…no, it can't be." Derc types away rapidly at his console and brings up another image that he puts next to Reyes'. Bearing in mind the angle and motion blur, the ships in the two images could be identical.

"What is that? Where did you find it?" Keema asks.

"This is a survey ship, built by the Initiative back in the Milky Way. Only four were ever made, using the most advanced experimental tech we had at the time."

Reyes remembers one sitting at the docks on the Nexus, a shining beacon of hope, and a prayer that the pathfinders would arrive soon and save them from the hell that was Andromeda. The arks had only started appearing after Reyes had bailed with the rest of the exiles, but from what he'd heard, they'd been just as luckless as the Nexus' unfortunate pioneers.

Still, when Reyes murmurs, "Pathfinder," a shiver runs down his spine. It was once a promise, of a new beginning, a better future, a place to call home. It hasn't meant that in a long time, but just the surrealism of seeing a pathfinder ship out here is enough to bring back the memory.

"They're trying to comm us," Keema says.

Reyes looks down; the incoming transmission light has been blinking for who knows how long. At Keema's nod, he presses accept.

"—would appreciate it if you _fuckers_ would stop shooting at us so we can talk," the person on the other end of the line is shouting.

"Who is this?" Keema asks before Reyes can respond in the same tone of voice and at the same volume.

"This is Alec Ryder of the _Tempest_ , the ship you're shooting at. Is this Keema Dohrgun, captain of _Defiance_? Tell your people to stand down. I only want to talk. As you might be able to see, we're unarmed."

"Keep your distance," Keema says to Ryder. She switches to the ship's intercom. "Scott, Sara, bridge. Now."

-

After Scott and Sara verify that it is indeed their father on the other ship, Keema allows it to get close enough for _Defiance_ to run as thorough of a scan as she can with the _Tempest_ 's stealth mode still activated. That's something Ryder hadn't been willing to compromise on, as turning it off would apparently alert the Alliance to the ship being in an unauthorised sector.

The scan comes back with an all-clear, and the _Tempest_ lands just close enough that its docking tube and _Defiance_ 's can meet in the middle. Keema goes alone to meet Ryder and comes back with him in tow, Scott's face growing increasingly stormy with every passing minute since he'd been called up to the bridge.

The resemblance between Scott and his father isn't apparent at first glance. Ryder is older than Reyes would have thought, his face creased and weathered and his hair almost completely grey. He's wearing a hardsuit decorated with N7 colours, but as per his agreement with Keema, isn't armed.

"Scott," Ryder says, his eyes scanning everyone in the galley before coming to a rest on Scott.

"What do you want," Scott says flatly.

Ryder looks around again. "Where's Sara?"

"Around. What do you want?"

"Can we go somewhere more private?"

"Here's fine." Scott takes a seat at the dining table.

Keema sits next to him, Reyes hops up onto the counter and so does Lynx, Crux sits on the other counter opposite them, and Nakamoto and Derc settle onto the couch in the corner. Sara's sitting in the stairwell off the hallway to the engine room, but Ryder can't see her from where he is. He eyes the rest of them warily before reluctantly pulling out a chair.

"How did you find us?" Scott breaks the uneasy silence at the table.

"I heard that you were travelling on board a Luciérnaga-class transport named _Defiance_ and asked some people to make discreet enquiries as to the ship's current whereabouts. When Vetra discovered you were on Eos, I sent the _Tempest_ to make contact, but you left before they arrived, and they couldn't follow you through FTL. After that, I joined them to offer SAM's superior scanning capabilities to aid in the search. We picked up your trail again near Havarl."

"SAM? Your AI?"

"He's finished. Not soon enough to save your mother, but maybe in time to still do other things."

Scott narrows his eyes. "What other things?"

"I need to speak with Sara."

"If she wants to talk to you, she'll come talk to you."

There's a pause as everyone waits to see if Sara will take the opening, but she doesn't move.

"Talk," Scott says to his father. "What 'other things'?"

Ryder heaves a heavy sigh and puts a hand to his head. After nearly a minute of complete silence, he says, "What do you know of the pathfinders?"

"Pathfinder?" Scott frowns. "Where have I heard that word before?"

"Before the Initiative left the Milky Way," Reyes says, "each ark appointed the best of their species to be a pathfinder, someone who would lead the exploration of their new homeworld. But, as you know, our 'golden worlds' didn't pan out, and for all their combat training, there was little the pathfinders could do when the cluster itself was working against them. Many died trying anyway, and the ones that survived were executed when the Nexus surrendered."

"The Initiative should never have gone ahead without an AI," Ryder says. "I warned Jien, but she was insistent that the deadline had to be kept. What difference would a few years have made?"

"So you're trying to use SAM to resurrect the pathfinders?" Scott asks.

"Not just trying to. I succeeded. Sara was to be the first of a new generation of pathfinders."

Scott's expression is somewhere between furious and incredulous, but he doesn't say anything.

"You weren't there when she activated the remnant vault on Eos, Scott," Ryder continues. "You didn't see the hope in the people's eyes as they looked up to her. She's just what we need to stand against the kett."

"I feel like the kett had the last say on Eos," Reyes says.

"It was just an experiment," Ryder says. "We weren't expecting anything to actually happen, let alone something significant enough to draw the attention of the kett in such a dramatic fashion."

"Hundreds of people died for your 'experiment'," Nakamoto points out.

"A mistake, then. Now that we know what SAM and Sara are capable of, we'll be able to do better next time, but in order to do that, I need to see Sara."

"Is that why you want her back?" Scott growls. "So you can prop her up as some kind of saviour of the people? Turn her into a martyr for your cause? Do you even care about what the Archon did to her?"

"Of course I care, Scott!" Ryder shouts. "But this is so much bigger than one person. If it was an option, I would take on the burden myself, but SAM is intrinsically tied to Sara now, and severing their connection could kill her. She's the only one that can do this."

"She's—what connection?"

"SAM interacts with pathfinders through an implant, similar to the ones biotics use to control and amplify their powers." Ryder's voice evens out as he gets into the explanation. "Hence, why the first person I asked was Sara. If she'd said no, I would have turned to someone else. But she wanted to do it, Scott. So I upgraded her implant to allow SAM to interface with it, then we went for a few test runs on uninhabited planets to see how well they worked together. Sara would be SAM's conduit to the world, and she would teach him about it in exchange for his superior processing speed and enhanced physical capabilities."

"What physical capabilities could an AI have?"

"None; he augments those of the person he's connected to. Biotic implants only connect to the user's nervous system, but SAM has access to everything: muscular, cardiovascular, endocrine, exteroceptive senses."

"That is very illegal," Lynx says, sounding impressed.

"It's also what gives him an edge over any other virtual or artificial intelligence you might install to your weapons, vehicles, or omni-tools."

"The Archon knew," Scott says. "That's why he took Sara."

"The Archon is obsessed with the remnant. I doubt he knows the specifics of how Sara activated the vault on Eos, but it's clear he thought she would be able to tell him. I don't think he would have been so quick to destroy the vault otherwise."

"This remnant vault you keep speaking of," Keema says. "What is it?"

"As far as we could tell, some kind of terraforming device. After Sara activated the vault on Eos, radiation levels began measurably improving almost immediately. Furthermore, we'd found evidence of similar vaults existing on all the golden worlds the Initiative had marked out."

"So the Archon wanted to make sure people didn't get the idea in their heads that they don't need to rely on the kett any longer."

"Most likely."

"But Sara didn't tell him, right?" Scott asks. "Otherwise he wouldn't still be after her."

"There have been stories that the Archon has the power to read people's memories. I don't know how accurate these stories are, but I couldn't take the chance of SAM being discovered, so I had him wipe Sara's memories and go into low-power mode."

"You what?" Scott's voice has gone dangerously low.

"He can return them easily enough, but Sara needs to come back with me to the Nexus so she can interface with SAM directly."

"Why did it take you so long to come look for us? Why did you stop me from looking for her in the first place? Why didn't you _try_?"

"I did!" Ryder's about to slam a fist on the table, but then he seems to remember he has an audience and stops mid-motion, setting his hand back on the tabletop. "I sent countless mercenaries after Sara, and none of them made it out alive, let alone with her. There was no point in letting you go as well."

"Well, you should have tried harder. Because I also hired mercenaries, and they did the job just fine."

"Yes, Vetra told me. She grew worried when you disappeared not long afterwards."

Scott looks a little guilty at that. "I didn't tell her what I'd planned because I didn't want to get her in trouble. I suppose she eventually found out that we'd both made it. Don't know who hasn't, between the arrest warrant and the bounty."

"Your contacts wouldn't happen to have told you who posted the initial bounty, would they?" Keema asks Ryder. "Before the Alliance posted theirs."

Now it's Ryder's turn to look guilty. "I did. I thought it would be the fastest way to get Scott and Sara back without it being traced back to me."

" _You_ put the bounty out on us?" Scott positively _explodes_. Reyes has never seen him so angry before, has never even thought Scott capable of such fury. "What about—and here's a wild idea— _asking_ us to come back?"

"I couldn't take the risk of communications being traced back to me," Ryder says like it should be obvious. "I had to protect SAM."

"What about us? We're your children!"

"SAM could be the key to the salvation of the entire cluster. I couldn't leave him to come after you until I was certain of your whereabouts."

"You've always been a terrible father." Scott storms off down the stairs.

Ryder lets out an exasperated sigh before reluctantly following Scott. No one goes to stop him.

"That was eventful," Keema says. "You have anything to say about this?" she asks Sara, still sitting in the other stairwell.

Sara's got her elbows propped on her knees, and is resting her chin on her clasped hands. She doesn't answer.

"Alright, back to work, everybody. I doubt the crew of the _Tempest_ means us ill will, but it won't hurt to be on our guard."

Reyes walks the length of the ship between the bridge and the engine room checking that _Defiance_ isn't any worse for tearing from one side of the cluster to the other with less care than usual, and listening to Scott and his father yell at each other in what sounds like the cargo bay. Reyes wouldn't be surprised if they can be heard on the _Tempest_ with how loudly they're going at it, rehashing old arguments and pointing out each other's character flaws.

Speaking of the _Tempest_ , Derc's made contact with its pilot and is talking to them in that too-fast-for-lesser-brains-to-comprehend way salarians do when they're amongst their own people. One Kallo Jath, engineer pilot, if the roster Keema finds in the Nexus records is current. Also a Suvi Anwar, researcher co-pilot, and a Gil Brodie, mechanic. That's all the crew listed, but surely Ryder didn't take off with just three other people, none of them with any combat experience.

His story about the AI appears to check out though, as when Reyes and Keema get together with Crux and Lynx to try and gain access to the _Tempest_ 's systems, their efforts are quickly rebuffed with a polite warning message.

_Are you SAM,_ Reyes types into the terminal.

There's what can only be described as a thoughtful pause. _Yes_.

"How do you tell the difference between an AI and a VI?" Crux asks.

"Ask it a personal question," Lynx suggests.

_Who would win in a fight: a taurg-sized shemrys, or a shemrys-sized taurg?_

Everyone around Reyes groans.

"That's too easy," Lynx says. "Taurg-sized shemrys."

" _That's_ your problem?" Crux says. "It's hardly a personal question."

"I want to see what it says." Reyes raptly watches the screen for a reply.

_Taurg-sized shemrys, definitively. Taurgs have little physical advantage other than their size and thick armour, whereas shemrys are capable of spitting poison, and would be able to neutralise a taurg before it came within arm's reach._

_What about in a fistfight,_ Reyes manages to type before Keema takes the keyboard from him.

_Neither shemrys nor taurgs possess appendages capable of forming fists, but I assume you mean to take the shemrys' ranged attacks out of the equation. In that case, I believe a taurg-sized shemrys would still have the advantage over a shemrys-sized taurg._

"What about ten shemrys-sized taurg?" Lynx asks.

"Shemrys are much smaller than taurgs," Reyes says. "You'd need at least twenty to make it a fair fight."

"Ask it what its favourite vid is," Crux says to Keema, who's holding the keyboard hostage with one hand and painstakingly typing on it with the other.

_How would you describe your creator's relationship with his daughter?_ Keema sends.

_I have little knowledge of familial relations beyond the media I have consumed and what few people I have been able to watch, but I can objectively say that the amount of meaningful contact between Alec and Sara Ryder is far lower than is statistically average, even after Sara agreed to help with the pathfinder program._

_Do you believe the pathfinder program will succeed?_

_At the risk of sounding self-important, I have gone over all records of combat and negotiation that came before unification, and I believe that had they my help, the original pathfinders would not have fallen. Many things are different now to what they were eight years ago, but if the pathfinder program fails, it will not be because of me._

"Bold words from what essentially boils down to a few lines of code," Keema says.

"History is marked by the insignificant who rose to great heights of boldness," Reyes says.

"Who said that?"

"I just did."

-

Scott and his father are still yelling at each other, but now they've taken it to one of the empty passenger rooms. Sara's sitting in the lounge outside the medbay, looking unperturbed by it all.

"They've never gotten along," she says when Reyes pauses as he walks by, looking between her and the source of the shouting match.

"They're arguing about you, you know," he says.

"I know."

"Maybe if you choose a side, they'll stop."

"I've already chosen. I just think Scott needs to get it out of his system."

Down the hall, Scott yells something incomprehensible and storms out of the room and into his. His angry departure is somewhat tempered by the fact that the doors can't be slammed without engaging the manual override.

"Hm, dad's going to come looking for me now," Sara says, sounding greatly displeased by this turn of events.

"Come on, I'll hide you in engineering if you promise not to blow anything up."

-

Sometime later, they hear Ryder stomping through the engine room above them, but he doesn't think to look down the hatch that leads to engineering, and leaves without finding them. Reyes sticks his head into the engine room to check if the coast is clear, and climbs back down to inform Sara, only to find her curled up in a corner looking through old family pictures on her omni-tool.

She's got the holoscreen up, so Reyes can see everything, from a young Scott and Sara chasing each other through what looks like a garden on the Citadel, to a photo of them as teenagers with their parents in the atrium of Ark Hyperion, dressed in their Initiative uniform, and one of adult Scott in dress blues looking perfectly coiffed and fondly exasperated as a laughing Sara takes a picture of them on her omni-tool.

That must be her most recent photo, because Sara pages through, and the next few photos are of her and Scott as children again. There's a longing, almost hungry look on her face as she intently studies each picture. Reyes quietly leaves her to her task.

Ryder goes back to the _Tempest_ soon after, then returns with a long case that he leaves on the dining table in the galley—a beautiful sniper rifle as a peace offering for Scott—before he departs _Defiance_ for good. Scott gives his father a flat, unimpressed stare when presented with the gift, but once Ryder is gone, Reyes sees Scott take the rifle back to his room.

Sara stays in engineering until dinner, when she sits down at the table and announces, "I'm going back to the Nexus."

"You really believed everything dad said about you being a pathfinder?" Scott's looking at her in disbelief.

"I don't know, and I don't care," Sara says, "but I want my memories back. If I have to go to the Nexus to get them, that's where I'll go."

"I won't be able to come with you. It's going to be hard enough just getting you there."

"I can look after myself." Sara flares her biotics in demonstration. "Little bro," she adds.

"Hey, I'm at least a week older than you now," Scott protests. "You were in cryo, remember?"

Sara narrows her eyes. "It doesn't matter, we're twins."

"Oh, _now_ she doesn't care."

Scott spends the rest of the evening following Sara around the ship like a forlorn puppy, and when she breaks the news to their father the next morning, she and Scott spend a long time hugging by the airlock.

"Take care," Scott says when they finally separate. "Call me. Or write to me. Don't let dad force you into anything you don't want to do."

"I got it, Scott. Don't worry so much." Sara shoves Scott in the arm.

"If you want us to come get you, you only have to let us know," Keema says.

Sara nods and looks at the rest of the crew gathered in the hall. "Thanks for everything. I know I've made some problems for you."

"All part of the job," Reyes says breezily. "Just don't forget us when you're a galaxy-famous pathfinder."

"Send credits," Lynx adds, "and I'll forget all about that time you nearly killed me while trying to pull off a nova in the cargo bay."

"It's a deal." Sara lays a lingering hand on Scott's shoulder before she manages to tear herself away. She crosses the joined docking tubes, the _Tempest_ 's pilot announces they're disengaging, then they take off, and Sara's gone.

-

_Defiance_ is set on a course back to Havarl, and the crew return to their usual duties while Scott hides himself in his room for most of the day, only emerging to join them for dinner.

"I'm going to check on the guns. Why don't you come with me?" Reyes says before Scott can disappear back into his room to mope.

"I'd rather—"

"Come on." Reyes puts a hand in the middle of Scott's back and steers him down the stairs. "Sara said you and your father never got along with each other."

"I wanted to be like him when I was younger. He was an N7; people liked him, respected him. But what I said about him being a bad father was true, I just didn't recognise it until we got here. He was never around, and when he was, he was…cold. Sometimes I wonder if he really wanted kids at all."

Scott sighs and watches quietly as Reyes runs his usual diagnostics on the port gun and its suspension, checking for signs of fatigue before moving over to the starboard battery. The guns had been aftermarket additions to _Defiance_ , held together with too much spot welding and electrical tape to pass any sort of quality control, but they'll hold for the next shot and the one after that, and maybe even the one after that.

"It's going to be weird without Sara around," Scott says as he runs his fingers along the barrel of the gun. "We were never really apart as kids, but I thought I'd sorted out the separation anxiety when we went down different career paths."

"I have a double bed," Reyes blurts out. Only two rooms on the ship are big enough for one, and the other is Keema's. "You know, if you don't feel like sleeping alone. I promise to be a perfect gentleman."

Scott gives the offer more careful consideration than Reyes would have expected. "And if I don't want you to be a gentleman?"

"That can be arranged," Reyes says in a low voice.

His omni-tool light is shining towards the far end of the battery so it's dark in the spot where they're standing, and he misses Scott leaning in until their foreheads bump against each other.

"Hi," Reyes says. He seems to be all out of his usual charm tonight.

"Hi," Scott says back, his breath warm on Reyes' lips.

Reyes tilts his head up ever so slightly, and Scott takes this as permission to close the gap between their lips. It's a soft, slow kiss, almost chaste and slightly awkward in the cramped space between the battery wall and the starboard gun, but it's been a long-awaited moment, apparently not just for Reyes.

"I've wanted to do that for the longest time," Scott says.

"How long?" Reyes asks.

"Kadara Port."

Reyes thinks of their night out on the town, of their short but eventful visit to Sloane's party, of watching the stars from a rooftop as they drank whiskey and ate fruit tarts. He puts his hand on Scott's chest and can still feel the outline of the pin he'd bought for Scott and attached to the inside of his jacket. "It was a hell of a night."

"A—no, before that." Scott sounds embarrassed, and Reyes turns his omni-tool light on Scott to see that he's averted his gaze.

"The first time we met? Really?" Keema's never going to hear about this, or she'll be all smug about being right for weeks.

"I remember wishing the circumstances had been different. If we'd met while I was on Alliance business, I might have defected right then and there."

Reyes laughs. "Is that so?" He reaches out and pulls Scott close with an arm around his waist. "Just what are you hoping to gain from such flattery?"

"This." Scott plants another kiss on Reyes' lips. "Seems to be working so far."

"Curious to see how far it'll take you?"

"Very."

Reyes kisses Scott again, teases him by sliding a hand under his shirt, then pulls away as Scott makes a noise of protest.

"My quarters, now," Reyes murmurs.

Scott stops complaining immediately.


	11. Business As Usual

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things start to go back to normal, which is not to say that it's all smooth sailing.

In the morning, they move from Reyes' quarters to the engine room, only they forget to close the door and Crux nearly catches an eyeful from the galley before Scott hurriedly shoves them out of view. They then make their way down to engineering where it's dark and warm, but it's also, Reyes discovers, devoid of anywhere comfortable to lie down between the grated floor and multitudes of cables that run across the room. They move to Scott's room instead and don't come out for the whole day.

The next morning, Scott wants to make breakfast. Pancakes and syrup, like he and Sara used to have on the Citadel. Reyes leans against the counter to watch, dressed only in pyjama pants with no shirt or shoes. It's early enough that they won't encounter any more of the crew for at least half an hour, which is more than enough time to make the pancakes and take them to Reyes' quarters.

The first batch takes a while as the pan isn't quite hot enough, so to pass the time, Scott pins Reyes against the counter and trails light kisses up the side of his chest. Reyes runs his hands through Scott's hair before pulling him up for a kiss, Scott's hands warm on Reyes' hips. Of course, that's when Keema walks in, clearing her throat and giving the smoking pan on the stove a pointed look. The pancakes that survive don't taste half bad.

The next day, when Derc walks past Reyes' quarters on the way to his own to get some sleep, Reyes suggestively raises his eyebrows at Scott, who's sitting on his bed flipping through a datapad, and tilts his head towards the bridge.

"Derc won't be back for at least an hour," Reyes says in response to Scott's own raised eyebrows. "We'll bring a blanket and some pillows, it'll be great."

It _is_ great. So good, in fact, that neither of them keep track of the time until the door to the bridge opens and Scott pulls Reyes down into the avionics bay with lightning-fast reflexes, wrapping the blanket around them.

Derc comes to a stop at the top of the stairs into the avionics bay, coffee cup in one hand and dark eyes blinking slowly.

"Do you mind?" Reyes says.

Scott kicks him under the blanket, and Derc turns around and leaves without a word.

By the fourth day, word of Scott and Reyes' exploits has spread to the rest of the crew, and Nakamoto locks them out of the medbay with locks Reyes didn't even know were on the doors. He's pretty sure he could fit through the window by the stairs and unlock the door from the inside, but it seems like too much effort for too little gain, so the medbay is safe for now.

On the fifth day, they rein themselves in to do some work as _Defiance_ makes a stopover at a space station where they learn some unwanted news: the bounty on Scott and Sara has gone up. Doubled, in fact, including the bounties for the rest of the crew.

"When did this happen?" Scott asks in dismay, like there was something he could have done to prevent it.

"The Alliance probably found out that the other bounty had been pulled and figured someone else had gotten their hands on you," Derc says. "It's no big deal."

"No big deal? Aren't more bounty hunters going to come after us now?"

"It's likely, but we've been able to take care of them so far," Keema says. "More bounty hunters on our trail also means more competition, so there's a good chance they'll take each other out before getting to us."

"But if we should give them a hint from time to time of where we are, it might serve to distract people from looking too closely at your father's absence from the Nexus these past few weeks," Reyes says.

Scott takes a deep breath. "Right. Good idea."

-

Their next stop is the planet of Gesaimo in the Nalesh system, devoid of native lifeforms but with an abundance of gold and aluminium. Consequently, the landscape is dominated by mining outposts of all factions, and though they've settled into a tenuous agreement not to attack each other directly, what happens in No Man's Land stays in No Man's Land. It's close to smuggler paradise.

 _Defiance_ doesn't visit Gesaimo often though, since the odds of being attacked in No Man's Land are greater than even that of Elaaden or the Badlands on Kadara, and each faction keeps its outposts under tighter guard than Sloane does Govorkam. Still, they've found themselves here now because an old client they'd worked with back in their Resistance days has reached out with a job offer.

"How do you know it's not a trap?" Scott had asked.

"It almost certainly is one," Keema had said. "We'll keep our guard up, but on the off chance the job is legitimate, the payoff will be worth the risk."

The meeting spot is a dried-up lake bed, completely flat with no cover for kilometres around.

"Definitely a trap," Crux says, standing on the cargo bay ramp.

"I have a cloaking module in my omni-tool," Scott says from the walkway above. "I can cover you with my sniper rifle."

"How long have you had cloaking tech and not told us?" Keema asks as everyone turns to look up at Scott.

"It's part of the standard Infiltrator outfit the Alliance uses." Scott gives them a half-hearted shrug. "But the cloaking is visual only; even the most basic scan can see through it, which is why I haven't been using it to hide from the Alliance."

"They won't expect us to have a sniper lying in wait," Reyes muses. "Could be helpful for us to have a trick up our sleeves."

"There's no way they wouldn't scan the area before landing," Crux says.

"That's what the scrambler's for. You can deactivate it right after the other ship lands before they get a good visual on us," Reyes says to Scott.

"I like it," Keema says. "Take some smoke grenades in case we need cover."

Their contact, Aureus Rocca, lands his ship _Galante_ a respectable distance from _Defiance_ , lowering his cargo ramp and coming out to meet them in the middle as agreed upon. As captain and second-in-command, Keema and Crux take this one while Reyes hangs back in the cargo bay, Derc keeps an eye on the scanners on the bridge, and Lynx waits in the starboard gunner's chair in case bigger guns are called for.

Keema and Crux are too far away for Reyes to hear, but negotiations appear to be going well, so he allows himself to give the other ship a once-over. _Galante_ , like _Defiance_ , is a transport ship that's been retrofitted with guns; a typical smuggling ship. She looks to have more raw firepower, but Reyes is willing to bet _Defiance_ could outmanoeuvre her. If all goes well, they'll never have to find out which ship would come out on top in a fight.

Aureus and Keema nod at each other, then both sides take their leave. Reyes watches Aureus and his second-in-command walk away, watches the crew members in the doorway of _Galante_ 's cargo bay, and though everyone is on edge, it's nothing out of the ordinary for a clandestine meeting of smugglers.

When Keema and Crux are halfway back to _Defiance_ , the crack of a gunshot splits the air. Somewhat insulated inside the cargo bay, it's hard for Reyes to pinpoint the source, but the important thing is that everyone on his side seems to be unharmed.

"What are you doing?" Keema hisses over the comms as she and Crux abandon their leisurely walk and make a run for it. Scott must have been the one to take the shot.

"Sniper on the roof of their ship," Scott says. "I fired a warning shot."

"Trap," Crux says sagely.

"Shooting people in the back, really?" Reyes squints across the flat stretch of sand to _Galante_ , whose cargo bay ramp is retracting.

"A distraction, I suspect," Derc says. "Something big is coming."

"A coincidence?"

"A ship. Looks to be a Hanover-class transport."

Damn, those things are _big_. And if the one coming towards them has also been retrofitted with guns—what hasn't, on this planet—they could be in trouble.

"Headed for us?" Keema asks. "Are you sure?"

The ground trembles, and clouds of sand rise up around the lake bed as a transport almost as large as an Alliance cruiser lands just behind _Defiance_. On low-gravity worlds like Gesaimo, those following nomadic lifestyles—smugglers, mostly—prefer larger ships for the extra storage space.

"Does that answer your question?" Derc asks Keema.

"Crew of _Defiance_ , get back on your ship." Aureus' voice echoes from _Galante_ 's external speakers. "That includes the sniper I know you've got hiding somewhere. And if I see so much as a wing twitch, I swear by the spirits, I will blow you sky high."

"Scott, turn on the scrambler and stay hidden," Keema says.

"But—"

"Do you want to die? Do as I say."

"Where's he supposed to go?" Reyes asks. It's at least a few hours' walk to the nearest outpost, and there's no guarantee they'll let Scott in.

"You'd rather he be on board when Aureus starts tallying the number of credits he's going to make from turning us in? Scott can't use the scrambler and the cloak together; there'll be nowhere for him to hide once Aureus starts tearing the ship apart."

Sometimes, there's really no good option. "Be safe," Reyes says.

Once _Defiance_ 's cargo bay doors are closed, the Hanover-class transport hits her with an EMP, then a ground crew affixes cables to the tow bar at the front and pulls _Defiance_ into the transport's hangar. _Galante_ taxis in after them, the hangar doors close, and the transport takes off.

"So, how fucked are we?" Lynx asks everyone gathered in the medbay lounge.

"Considerably," Keema says. "The only consolation is that Aureus doesn't seem to have worked out a deal with the Alliance beforehand, or one of their ships would have come to pick us up."

"Poor consolation," Nakamoto says.

"But it buys us time," Reyes says.

"To do what?"

"To…fake our deaths," Reyes throws out.

"The bounty's good dead or alive." Crux points out.

"I thought Aureus was Resistance," Derc says.

"Resistance adjacent," Reyes corrects. "Like we once were. And will be again, if we keep doing more jobs for them."

"Whatever his past affiliations, he's clearly not working for the Resistance now, and we can't rely on them to get us out of this," Keema says. "The airlock doors have manual overrides on them, don't they?"

"You think Aureus plans on keeping us in here until the Alliance arrives? He's got to know a simple EMP won't be enough to keep us contained." Reyes can already think of half a dozen ways to get off _Defiance_ , and only two involve causing her significant damage.

But before they can decide on an escape plan, the transport touches down, and the crew exchange glances. To their knowledge, Aureus doesn't have an outpost on Gesaimo, and the meeting spot hadn't been close to any kett or Alliance outposts.

Heavy footsteps from what sounds like a small army echoes around them as someone boards the transport. Reyes gets to the window in the cargo bay door first, and sees a krogan he'd thought he would never meet again. Hoped, rather.

"Oh no," Reyes says.

"Oh no," Crux echoes, looking out the window of the other door.

Lynx joins Reyes at his window. "Oh no."

"Oh no," Derc says from next to Crux.

Keema leans past Reyes and Lynx. "Oh skkut."

"Jutor Scrag," Reyes says for Nakamoto's benefit.

Further back in the cargo bay, Nakamoto puts on his we're-about-to-die-and-I've-accepted-my-fate face. Despite all their recent close calls, that one hasn't made an appearance in a while.

The last time they'd run into him, Scrag had been the leader of a scavenger gang on Elaaden, and had stolen a very expensive shipment of eezo _Defiance_ had been transporting. Determined not to let their cargo go, they'd given chase, and the pursuit had culminated in a week-long shootout with Scrag and his gang entrenched in a cave, _Defiance_ parked outside. The eezo had been recovered and Scrag and most of his gang had been killed, or so they'd thought.

"Note to self," Lynx mutters under her breath, "if you ever plan on killing a krogan again, make sure they're actually dead and not just dying when you leave. Otherwise, you might find yourself in situations like this one."

Aureus and Scrag exchange a few words, then as they leave the transport's hangar, something pushes _Defiance_ from behind, and she slowly rolls down the ramp of the transport into the outpost.

"What do we do?" Lynx asks. "Our weapons still work; how many of them are out there?"

"Too many to shoot," Keema says. "And they've got anti-aircraft guns mounted on the buildings that I think can reach us down here."

"And that guy has a grenade launcher," Crux points out.

"I have biotics." Lynx flexes her hands and eyes the aforementioned guard.

"But not enough to shield all six of us, right?" Keema asks.

Lynx sighs. "Maybe if Sara was still here we could have made it work. Or she might have accidentally blown us up instead, it's hard to say."

Two people begin to approach the cargo bay door carrying a large circular saw between them.

"Do _not_ bring that any closer," Reyes hisses.

They don't hear him, of course, but the ear-splitting screech as metal meets metal is audible to everyone in the vicinity.

The cargo bay doors were not built to keep things out of the ship, which gives them a few minutes at most before they find themselves at Scrag's mercy.

"They're cutting holes in my ship!" Reyes complains. "What are we going to do about it?"

"Stars, what a time to not have those smoke grenades." Keema puts a hand to her head.

"We have regular grenades," Lynx offers. "They're in the arms locker just back there."

"We could pick them off as they come in," Reyes adds.

"We could also destroy the ship in the process," Keema says. "Then how will we get away?"

"We definitely won't if we don't live through the next five minutes."

"We'll talk to him."

"Because asking nicely worked out so well for us last time."

There's no time for anyone else to put forward a better idea before the cargo bay doors are kicked in by a shotgun-wielding Scrag. Armed guards of various Milky Way species file into the cargo bay around him.

"Weren't there seven of you?" Scrag asks as he scans the cargo bay, kicking away the part of the door that's become detached.

"We're six now," Keema says. "Have been for a while."

"I suppose one less won't make a difference. I've waited a long time to get my hands on you again."

"Really?" Reyes says. "All these years? You've just been…waiting?"

He can feel Keema giving him a please-don't-antagonise-the-crazy-krogan look.

"Waiting to crack your skull open and rip out your spine!" Scrag bellows.

Reyes' heart stutters; there's not a person across two galaxies whose bravado wouldn't falter a little when coming face to face with an angry krogan.

Still, Reyes ploughs on, because he'll be damned if he goes quietly to his death. Keema wanted to talk? Then talk is what she'll get. It's one of Reyes' many talents. "I was hoping we could put this all behind us. You stole something from us, we stole it back from you, how about we call it even and go our separate ways?"

"You killed my entire crew, and tried to kill me!" Scrag waves the shotgun in Reyes' direction, no trigger discipline at all, and it takes all of Reyes' willpower not to flinch.

"Which could have been avoided had you just given back what you'd stolen," he patiently explains. "But you forced us to fight over it, you lost, and as was our right as the victors, we took what we were owed. Which, if you remember, was what you did to us in the first place. So let's consider the matter settled."

"I'll consider it settled over your dead body!"

There's just no reasoning with some people. Fortunately, Scrag seems to have a more theatrical death in mind for them than just a simple firing squad, which buys them a few extra minutes as they're shepherded through the outpost.

Most of the inhabitants appear to be civilians, who avert their eyes and pretend to be busy at work when the procession passes. Even the guards don't seem to share Scrag's fervour for violence, which leads Reyes to think that the outpost and its operation predate Scrag's rule, and that they might be amenable to being out from under his thumb.

It's information that's only useful if Scrag leaves them alone for a minute, which seems unlikely as they're headed for a huge pit, presumably where their bodies will be ending up once Scrag's done extracting the justice he feels he's owed.

He stops a few metres from the edge of the pit and launches into another one of his graphic death threats, only to be interrupted by a comm message.

"Overlord Scrag?" the timid voice on the other end of the line says.

Scrag irritably stabs at his omni-tool. "This better be important. I'm in the middle of something here."

"Aureus Rocca has returned and is asking permission to land."

"What does that quadless turian want now?"

"He says he found something that you might be interested in, and wants to present it as a gift."

Reyes immediately thinks of Scott, but surely he would be worth more to the Alliance than to Scrag, and Aureus has little to gain by not turning Scott in himself for the bounty.

"Fine, whatever. Let the grovelling coward in." The words have scarcely left Scrag's mouth than the sharp crack of a gunshot pierces through the low rumble of machinery, and Scrag falls to the ground.

Time seems to stop for a second, then Reyes hears someone behind him attacking the guards, and on instinct he does the same, getting low and tackling the human woman closest to him.

Reyes grabs the guard's rifle and his first thought is to fire a few more rounds into Scrag, just to make sure the bastard stays dead this time; damned krogans and their redundant systems. Lynx has the same idea, as does Keema, and the guards don't move to stop them, or put up more than a token struggle. Once they see their boss is down and isn't getting back up, they give up the fight entirely.

"Was that as good for you as it was for us?" Reyes asks the guard he'd taken down. She gives him a noncommittal shrug, and he holds out a hand to help her up.

"What happens now?" someone else asks.

"Our business with you is done," Keema says. "You'll want to make sure that one's well and truly dead lest you run into the same problem we did."

"We ought to pay Aureus a visit before we go," Reyes says. The shots had come from the direction of the landing zone.

"I do wonder what sort of gift he was bringing."

Derc and Nakamoto return to _Defiance_ while the rest of them head to the spot where _Galante_ 's touched down. The first thing Reyes sees as he rounds the corner is Scott, sniper rifle in his hands as he argues with a radio operator. Aureus is in the background loitering on _Galante_ 's cargo ramp, looking awkward and unsure of that he's doing.

"Reyes!" Scott shoulders his rifle and runs over, relief visible on his face.

"What are you doing here?" Reyes reaches out for Scott and tugs him close, as if holding on to him will be enough to stop anyone from taking him away.

"I stowed away on Aureus' ship while everyone was busy looking at _Defiance_ ," Scott says. "But I couldn't figure out how to get out until after the transport had left the outpost, so I took Aureus hostage and made him come back."

"He doesn't look like much of a hostage to me," Keema says.

If turians were inclined to slouching or hiding their hands in pockets, Reyes is sure Aureus would be doing both right now.

"He owed that krogan—Scrag—something like a hundred thousand credits. Scrag said he'd forget about it if Aureus brought you guys to him."

"Sounds to me like he owes us one now for taking care of his problem."

"Yeah, I think he's realised."

"Was it you who…" Reyes trails off, looking at the Widow over Scott's shoulder.

Scott exhales slowly. "Yeah. I didn't plan to, but he looked pretty angry and I had a clear shot, so…I figured not taking it would be worse."

"You did good." Keema claps Scott on the shoulder as she passes him on her way to talk to Aureus.

Scott nods weakly, and his grip on Reyes' hand tightens.

"We're going back to the ship," Reyes tells Crux and Lynx. "See you there."

Derc has started the generator to reboot _Defiance_ 's electrical systems, but they'll be grounded for a while to run diagnostics, not to mention fixing the cargo bay door if they want to leave atmo.

Nakamoto's outside the cargo bay dispensing medical advice to the small crowd that's gathered there. "The miners have offered to repair the door," he says as Scott and Reyes pass him.

"Good, I'll come by to check on them later," Reyes says, not stopping as he steers Scott inside.

Reyes' quarters have been looted of everything worth more than half a credit and not bolted down, including his entire model ship collection. He sighs; none of them were really rare or expensive, but he'd meticulously put together each one, and built the cupboard over his desk specifically to display them.

"Were they special to you?" Scott asks.

"Just a reminder, I suppose."

"Of home?"

"Of the Milky Way." Director Addison had been wrong about many things, but she'd been right when she'd said Andromeda was their home now, whether they liked it or not.

Scott's standing aimlessly in the middle of the room, gently swaying on his feet and staring blankly at the empty shelves, so Reyes gently takes the Widow and sets it on his desk, then directs Scott towards the showers. Once Reyes hears the water start running, he ducks into the other shower to quickly clean himself up, then changes the sheets on his bed that have been wrinkled and stained by bootprints from people standing on the mattress to reach the higher shelves.

Scott comes back from his shower with a towel around his neck and his hair still dripping. He looks to be seconds away from falling over, so Reyes sits him down on the bed and towels his hair dry for him.

"You made your first kill today," Reyes says conversationally.

Scott makes a vague noise of agreement.

"It was the right choice," Reyes continues.

Scott makes another noise. "I know," he eventually says. "I just…need a moment."

Reyes repositions the towel to use a drier part of it, and Scott leans back, further and further until Reyes is supporting his entire upper body.

"You still awake down there?" Reyes removes the towel and looks down at Scott, whose eyes are closed. There's no reply. "Guess not."

Reyes hasn't restarted his omni-tool yet after it was zapped by the EMP, but no one's banging on his door or trying to contact Scott, so it's safe to assume that the others are doing fine without him and he can take a few extra minutes to sit here with Scott.

-

A few extra minutes turns into a few hours when Reyes falls asleep sitting on the bed, Scott lying on top of him. Reyes fumbles for his omni-tool, remembers it's not working, then gently lays Scott down on the bed and goes to check the time on Scott's omni-tool on the desk—it's been two hours since they'd returned to _Defiance_ , which means Reyes has slacked off enough and should really get out there to see what he can help with.

Keema, Crux, and Lynx still aren't back, Nakamoto's seeing patients in the medbay, and Derc is in the cargo bay organising the strangers that are moving various boxes and crates around.

"What's happening here?" Reyes asks.

"They're giving back everything they took off the ship," Derc says, checking something off a datapad. "That one's for you."

On the stairs are open-top collapsible boxes filled with seemingly random items. In one of them, Reyes recognises the nose of Commander Shepard's famed Normandy SR-1 sticking out the top, and grabs the box to set it on top of a stack of crates and inspect its contents. It contains other things that had been taken from his room: knives, pistols, datapads, rainy day projects that are little more than a mess of wires and circuit boards.

Reyes is on the fence about whether to take a peek in the other boxes, but before he can decide either way, Keema makes an appearance.

"Are we spaceworthy yet?" she asks as she strides through the cargo bay.

Reyes looks at the space where the old cargo bay doors were removed but the new ones haven't been put in yet. "No. What's the rush?"

"No rush, just wondering. Scrag is dead, the outpost is now under Aureus' command, and he's agreed to give us anything we ask for."

"Aureus is taking over the outpost?" Reyes follows Keema up the stairs by the medbay.

"The miners need someone to protect them, and Aureus has agreed he doesn't have much of a head for the smuggling business. But he does have a ship full of capable fighters who can guard the outpost and the transport ships, so he's going legitimate."

As legitimate as one can get on a planet full of people working outside the law, Reyes supposes. "That's two he owes us, then."

"Always good to have someone indebted to you wherever you go."

Keema bids Reyes farewell to disappear into her quarters, only to reappear a second later after taking in the state of her room.

"Derc's rounding up everything that was taken," Reyes tells her. "Check the boxes on the stairs."

Reyes carries his and Scott's boxes of possessions back to his quarters, and is painstakingly replacing the model ships back on their shelves when Scott wakes up.

"How long was I out?" he asks.

"A few hours. Don't worry, you didn't miss anything exciting." Reyes pokes through the box he's holding some more.

"You got your ships back."

"I did. Your room was ransacked too, you might want to check this and see if anything is missing." Reyes nods at the other box on his desk.

In his time on _Defiance_ , Scott has amassed a collection of small knick-knacks passed to him by the rest of the crew. There's a tactical scope Crux used to favour until she'd discovered Scott was a sniper, various mods Lynx has tinkered with and are no longer under warranty, a scarf Nakamoto had given Scott after Voeld, a data chip with old-school Milky Way vids on it Derc had gambled for at a bar, and a small angaran sun lamp with yevara etched into the body Reyes thinks he saw in Keema's quarters once.

"I wonder what they wanted with this," Scott says as he sifts though his worldly possessions. "It would have fetched them a few credits at most."

"They were clearly in a rush." Reyes picks up an EMF suppressor from his own box that's got one bent leg and another entirely missing. "Look at this! Why do I have this?"

"You're a bit of a hoarder." Scott leans over and pulls out a half-disassembled energy cell. "What's this?"

"I'm still working on that, put it down."

"This?"

"Rebreather. I'm improving it."

"Mangling it, more like. What about this?"

"Calibration coil." Reyes gives it a closer inspection. "Obsolete. You can toss it."

After emptying out the box, Reyes' room still looks rather sparse, and another trip to the cargo bay reveals three more boxes Derc has designated as his.

"You _are_ a hoarder," Scott says accusingly.

"I'll have you know most of this comes from the engine room. And before you start making accusations about it being junk, this junk is what I used to build that scrambler that saved your ass."

"So I could come save _your_ ass." Scott flashes him a grin behind Derc's back. "Well played."

"I don't know if this is foreplay for you two or what, but please just take the boxes and go." Derc makes a checkmark on his datapad.

"Oh, we'll _go_ all right." Reyes lays on the euphemism thick to see Scott stifle a laugh. "A few rounds while no one's looking."

Derc lets out a pained groan and moves himself to the other side of the cargo bay.

Scott and Reyes get up to nothing of the sort, of course, as after the tools and spare parts are returned to the engine room, the galley needs to be cleaned and restocked, the fuel tanks refilled, the water filters replaced, and the grav moderator recalibrated to make sure gravity on the ship will work as expected once they're in space.

 _Defiance_ leaves Gesaimo two days later, scratches buffed, missing parts replaced, and her engines running as smoothly as after the full servicing she'd had on Voeld. They even part ways semi-amicably with Aureus, though Reyes doubts they'll be coming back any time soon to cash in their favours.

It's back to the dark of space for _Defiance_ and her crew, running illicit cargo from one end of the cluster to the other, dodging Alliance, kett, and bounty hunters. Scott all but moves into Reyes' quarters, spending more nights there than not. When Reyes wakes with the weight of Scott in his arms, he takes a moment to bask in the warmth of Scott pressed up against him before getting out of bed to attend to his duties. Just business as usual.


	12. Old Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sara makes a reappearance and sends _Defiance_ off to call on old friends.

Sara's calling Reyes, which is mildly alarming, but when he picks up the vidcall, she looks healthy—happy, even—with colour in her cheeks and a bright spark in her eyes.

"Sara!" he exclaims. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Reyes, good to see you." Sara smiles at him, the corners of her eyes crinkling the same way Scott's do.

"You look good. How have you been?"

"Great. Fantastic. Never better, in fact. Can we meet up? You, me, the rest of the crew?"

"Something wrong?"

"No, I need your help with something, but I can't say much on this line. I'll see you at the place we first met."

Sara hangs up before Reyes can ask for more clarification.

Reyes relays the message to Scott first, checking to see if Sara had hinted at wanting to meet up in any of their recent correspondence. They've been communicating on unsecure channels so she wouldn't have said anything outright, but Scott tells Reyes he hasn't heard anything beyond the usual small talk they make with each other, careful not to mention names or locations.

"Is she in trouble?" Scott pokes his head into the engine room, immediately back in worrying-about-Sara mode.

"It didn't seem like it. It was a vidcall, and she looked to be in good spirits."

"Why didn't she call me?"

"Do you have any secret codes for places to meet?"

"No?"

"That's probably why."

"Well—"

"Scott, it could have been for any number of reasons. Do you want to see her or not?"

"Of course I do."

"Then let's tell Keema we've a stop to add to our itinerary."

They deliver their cargo to Havarl and pick up another delivery job for a scavenger station in Sephesa that they can stop by on their way to Mendradym. They have to lose an Alliance pursuit after leaving the station—they're going to have to be pickier about who they take jobs from nowadays with their increasing notoriety—but that's practically routine now, and after getting out of range, _Defiance_ makes for Mendradym.

Derc lands her not far from where their deal had gone down the last time they were here, but they're the only ones around, as far as both the eye and _Defiance_ 's scanners can see. They don't go outside since Mendradym's atmosphere isn't conducive to breathing, but Sara hadn't given Reyes any indication of what day or time they were supposed to meet, and no one has heard from her since that vidcall, so there's little they can do but sit and wait.

It's more than a day later when they're contacted by a ship that doesn't show up on the scanners.

"Hail, _Defiance_ ," comes Sara's voice over the comm.

"Sara!" Derc says. "Good to hear from you. What's your ETA?"

"About two minutes. If you send us your navpoint, we'll set down next to you."

The _Tempest_ touches down with incredible precision, her port wing coming frighteningly close to _Defiance_ 's starboard engine. The two ships join docking tubes like they had before and Sara crosses over to _Defiance._ Scott's waiting at the airlock to pull her into a bone-crushing hug. He then starts bombarding her with questions before the rest of the crew even see her, but Sara slings an arm around his shoulders and guides them out to the galley.

"So, should we be calling you 'Pathfinder' now?" Reyes asks.

"No, we're keeping it under wraps for now. Don't want a repeat of what happened to Prodromos," Sara says.

"You've really done it, then?" Scott asks. "You've activated a vault?"

Sara nods. "On Havarl. The vegetation there is thick enough that the changes probably won't be noticed for months. That'll buy us a little time."

"Guess the old man really was telling the truth." Scott looks perturbed by this revelation.

"He's really done it, Scott. You should come over to the _Tempest_ and meet SAM, all of you."

"Is dad there?"

"No, he's on the Nexus keeping an eye on SAM's servers."

"Then lead the way."

They all go over to the _Tempest_ and Sara gives them a tour of the ship, interspersed with trivia from a cool male voice over the speakers that Reyes assumes is the AI named SAM.

The _Tempest_ is the best of the best that the Initiative has to offer even ten years after arrival, and it shows: the labs have tech that outstrip the capabilities of entire research stations, the stealth system remains unparalleled to this day, and the drive core allows the ship to traverse dark space at a record-setting top speed of thirteen light years a day.

They lose Derc on the bridge to the _Tempest_ 's pilot, Lynx in the cargo bay to the ND1 Nomad parked there, and nearly Reyes to the biggest drive core he's ever seen on a ship this size in engineering, except he's far too curious about SAM to leave the tour early.

It ends in the pathfinder's quarters, larger than the crew quarters and showers combined, and boasting floor-to-ceiling windows and a 180-degree view out the back of the ship.

"We should get a ship where my room's this big," Keema says.

"And the rest of us can sleep in bunks?" Reyes asks.

"Why not? It'll build character."

"You think I don't have enough character?"

Sara introduces SAM as a holographic projection of a glowing blue orb on her desk.

 ** _There is no need to approach my terminal to converse with me, Sara,_** says the same voice that had narrated their tour. **_I am contactable from any part of the ship._**

"I know," Sara says. "Us organics just like to see who we're talking to. Humour us."

**_Very well._ **

"How does this translate into activating remnant vaults?" Keema asks.

"SAM can…talk to remtech, I guess you can call it. One console is pretty much the same as another, just like one monolith is like any other, and by extension, the vaults the remnant left across Heleus should be similar to the ones we've already activated on Eos and Havarl. As long as we can find them, we should be able to turn them on."

"But the vault on Eos was destroyed, wasn't it?" Scott asks.

"We haven't been back to check, but I'm sure the entrance at least is unusable now. I bet we could repair it, though—the remnant built their structures to last. We just have to find out how."

"Is that the next part of your plan?" Keema asks.

"No, I've got something bigger in mind. Come on, let's get everyone together in the conference room."

The _Tempest_ 's ground crew, who until now have made themselves scarce, crowd around half the vidcon unit while _Defiance_ 's crew takes up the other side, both sides eyeing each other with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. The _Tempest_ crew is an odd mixture of Milky Way species and an angaran, much like _Defiance_ , Reyes supposes. He recognises a few faces from his days on the Nexus, but no one he'd been friendly with.

Sara brings up the holo of a planet that's as familiar to Reyes as Earth. "Kadara," she says, looking around the room.

"Not Voeld?" Reyes asks. "The Resistance is sure to be willing to provide backup. I don't think Sloane will feel the same way."

Sara shakes her head. "There are kett on Voeld, and the effects of the vault being activated would be too easy for them to detect."

"Kadara might be free of kett, but not of spies. Things won't be kept quiet for long. What about Elaaden?"

"I don't want to activate a vault anywhere it would benefit the kett or the Alliance. That's why I chose Kadara. We'll need a stronghold to fall back to once the fighting starts, and Kadara has by far the best defences."

"Not if the kett send in their dreadnoughts," Reyes points out.

"We just need to put together some planetary defence cannons and set up internal supply lines, which will be easier once the vault's been activated."

"You make it sound so easy. But you'll never get Sloane to agree."

"She's already said no, but I think there's another avenue worth pursuing: have you ever heard of the Collective?"

 _Defiance_ 's crew exchanges looks with each other.

"Some of us used to be part of the Collective," Crux says.

All of them save Nakamoto, actually, but the others don't know how Reyes and Keema came to know each other.

"What do you know about the Charlatan?" Sara asks.

Reyes and Keema glance at each other. Keema's eyes widen just a fraction, and Reyes looks away.

"No one knows anything about the Charlatan," Crux replies. "That was kind of the point."

"If you can find someone who used to be one of their representatives, they might know more," Lynx says.

Out of the corner of his eye, Reyes can see Keema giving him a significant look. If anyone notices, they don't comment on it.

"Do you know anyone who was?" Sara asks. "Or better, how to get in touch with them?"

Lynx and Crux both shrug.

"But we can try, I suppose." Crux looks at Keema, who's now staring at the hologram of Kadara.

"I might have some old contacts left over from the Collective days," Derc says.

"Great! We've got ourselves a plan." Sara beams at them.

It's almost impossible to get signals in and out of Mendradym due to the electrical storms that dominate the upper layers of the atmosphere, but they don't leave right away. Sara, in anticipation of both crews working together, proposes a get-to-know-you dinner first, hosted in _Defiance_ 's galley because the _Tempest_ 's can barely fit four people let alone eighteen.

"Why didn't you tell them?" Keema says when she and Reyes get a moment alone while the others are preparing their half of the food to be served at dinner.

"To what end?" Reyes says, not looking at Keema as he worries at a flaking chip of paint on the wall. "Like you've said before, there are plenty of people pretending to be the Charlatan nowadays. Let Sara pick one of them, or better yet, tell her _you're_ the Charlatan."

"No one knows Kadara like you do—"

"Did. Haven't been back for more than a few days at a time in years. The planet's an entirely different place now. And this is where I want to be, not stuck on the ground coordinating a network of spies on a planet I don't even call home anymore."

Keema studies him for a long time. "Alright, if that's what you really want, we'll help the others search for a suitable replacement."

-

 _Defiance_ and the _Tempest_ have synced their clocks to that of their home ports—Kadara Port and the Nexus, respectively—so what's an early dinner for the _Tempest_ is a late breakfast for _Defiance_. Apparently, the krogan on the _Tempest_ is the one who does most of the cooking—there have been times Reyes wished _Defiance_ had a krogan on her crew, but all the krogan he's met are totally nuts or too smart to get involved with them—and he sends over what looks like enough food to feed both ships. Turns out, biotics are ravenous eaters, krogan even more so, and when together they make up half your crew, you learn to prepare enough food. With _Defiance_ 's cash flow problems, maybe it's a good thing she doesn't have a krogan on her crew after all.

Scott doesn't leave the _Tempest_ since after the tour, but comes back with Sara when it's time to eat, their arms around each other's shoulders and their heads bent as they laugh at some inside joke.

Scott barely pays Reyes any mind, which is fine, because of course he would want to spend more time with his sister, so Reyes entertains himself quizzing the _Tempest_ 's mechanic, Gil, about the ship's specs. When Kallo overhears their conversation, it sparks what sounds like an old argument between him and Gil about some upgrades, and Derc takes Kallo's side which means Reyes feels obliged to take Gil's side, and their end of the table completely ignores everyone else for the rest of the meal.

Once conversation around the table dies down and people start cleaning up, Scott approaches Reyes.

"How’s Sara been?" Reyes asks.

"Great, she seems to really be in her element." Scott still sounds pleased, but his cheerful demeanour from before has been considerably tempered. "Listen, I'm going to join her for a little while."

Reyes tries hard to keep his voice casual. "A little while?"

"Just until we meet up again, then I'll be back."

It's an awfully vague timeframe, and it's not that Reyes doubts Scott's sincerity, but it's been Reyes' experience that life often takes you down many roads you don't want to go. Weeks turn into months turn into years, and suddenly, you're strangers.

Still, as much as he doesn't want to let Scott go, Reyes says, "Sure, take as much time as you need. Just remember to let Keema know."

"Thanks, Reyes." Scott sounds relieved. "I'll go tell Keema, then I'll pack my things. Want to help?"

Fifteen minutes later, they're in Reyes' quarters with Scott pushed up against the door, Reyes' mouth hot on Scott's collarbone as Scott groans in contentment and runs his hands through Reyes' hair. Reyes would normally complain, but right now he's more concerned with how much of Scott he can dedicate to memory before they have to part ways. They don't have much time—the commotion above is loud enough that Reyes can hear Sara's crew returning to their ship—so he focuses on the important things, namely, the taste of Scott's lips on his, and the feeling of holding Scott in his arms that he's become accustomed to in the last few weeks.

"I'll come back," Scott says, his voice muffled as he presses his face into Reyes' shoulder.

"I know," Reyes says with more certainty than he feels. "Write to me."

"I will."

They share one last kiss, longing and desperate, then Sara is wandering down the corridor above them calling Scott's name.

"I have to go," he says.

"I'll miss you," Reyes says.

Scott throws a few last-minute things into his bag, then grabs it and climbs up the ladder to the main deck. Reyes takes a minute to splash some water on his face and compose himself before joining the others for goodbyes. He doesn't look at Scott and Scott doesn't look at him, then the _Tempest_ is gone, and Scott with it.

-

There's an emptiness inside Reyes when he lies in his bed alone that night, magnified by the coldness of the other side of the bed. He's had several partners and one night stands over the years, but none of them have ever been invited back to the ship let alone stayed the night. The other side of the bed's been empty for a long time, but after just a few weeks of having another warm body there, Reyes can't get used to sleeping alone anymore.

The others will surely make fun of him for wandering sleeplessly around in the dark—maybe not Derc, but he'll try to give advice instead, which is almost as bad—so Reyes queues up Fleet and Flotilla on his omni-tool and props himself up on the pillows with a bar of imitation chocolate from the stash he keeps in the hidden drawer in the headboard. He might care about the crew more than he does anyone else, but some things a person just has to keep for themselves.

Derc makes first contact with the Collective—supposedly—which takes them to Adamar Station in the Solminae system, just a short FTL jump away from Mendradym. It's one of the most remote trading posts in the cluster, angaran built and run, albeit with a heavy Alliance presence. Despite the large numbers of angara, the Resistance doesn't dare work out in the open here, but apparently, Derc's Collective contact—a turian named Thrasia whose name seems vaguely familiar to Reyes—doesn't have similar qualms, and operates her smuggling business alongside her barely-legitimate vehicle repair shop.

Derc and Keema go to the meeting while Reyes registers _Defiance_ under the name _Lachrymose_ , which Crux gives him an endless amount of shit for—"just call her _Misery_ , why don't you, you sad sap"—until Reyes gives her an annoyed shove that with the lower gravity around the docks nearly sends her flying over the safety railing.

They haven't gone to as much effort in their deception as they had on Eos so _Defiance_ doesn't have any registration markings painted on her bow, but the docks manager only fines Reyes the customary amount which he dutifully hands over—it's a small price to pay for anonymity—and leaves the matter there.

With Derc otherwise occupied, Reyes takes it upon himself to gather intel at the closest bar. It's mostly pilots and dockhands enjoying their rare downtime, and once Reyes introduces himself as a shuttle pilot looking to make the most of his short layover, the cheap drinks and sense of camaraderie makes them loose-lipped.

Turns out, the Alliance presence here is no more than a token show of force: most of them are baby-faced infantry fresh out of the Academy with little to no combat experience, and though some of the commanders are hardasses, they're kept busy enough with frequent drunken brawls across the station and keeping their eyes peeled for Resistance spies that other illegal activity goes on largely unscrutinised. Trade benefits the station, after all, and getting extra luxuries the Alliance doesn't provide them with makes turning a blind eye to the blatant smuggling worth it.

Some of the other pilots have heard whispers of the Collective operating on the station, but none of them have any first-hand evidence of the rumours being true. Reyes steers the conversation back to where everyone's sourcing their…supplemental income, and leaves the bar with a list of people to hit up for smuggling jobs.

Derc and Keema are back already by the time Reyes returns to _Defiance_. All Thrasia's given them is a comm frequency.

"Who's that supposed to reach?" Reyes asks.

"The Charlatan, supposedly," Derc says, "though I doubt they're the real thing if their representatives are giving out their number so easily."

Reyes had been beyond paranoid when he'd been the Charlatan, mostly because he hadn't wanted anyone to find out he was located in the port itself, which would have prompted Sloane to launch a violent inquisition for sure. By keeping everything about himself secret, she'd dismissed him as being too cowardly to be a real threat, and the Collective had been left alone for the most part.

"Can't hurt to try," Keema says.

"It could," Reyes says. "It could hurt a lot."

"It's the only lead we have right now." Derc's not looking, so Keema gives Reyes a pointed look.

"You're the captain."

Just as Reyes is about to leave, Keema calls him back.

"Thrasia wanted you to come by her shop," she tells him.

"Me?"

"She asked for you by name, and wouldn't tell us what it was about."

Reyes wracks his brain for what dealings they've had with each other in the past, but beyond a few smuggling jobs of no real importance, he comes up blank. "Did she seem…angry? Maybe…vengeful?"

"No, just secretive. But I can't read turians all that well. Do you want me to come with you?"

"No need, I'm not going. We don't need the risk right now with everything else going on."

-

Lynx meets someone she knows from the Nexus days and petitions Keema to stay at Adamar for the night to gather information. She dances around the topic of exactly what kind of information, which leads Reyes to think this is more about the person than their intel. From Keema's sigh, she's thinking it too, but she agrees and gives everyone the rest of the night off.

Reyes plans on spending it in his quarters listening to his carefully-curated playlist of sad songs, feeling sorry for himself, and waiting for Scott to write back, but Crux ruins it by insisting he accompany her to a club on the other side of the station where it's supposedly Classics Night and they'll be playing the Milky Way's Top 100 of 2185 on loop.

Reyes has to admit it's rather fun; the music is loud, the lights are down low, no one's in uniform, and everyone's dancing their worries away. At least, it's fun until Crux ditches him for some cute young thing, probably Alliance, though factions don't matter much when you're riding the high of the night with your tongues in each other's mouths and hands under each other's shirts.

Reyes briefly entertains the thought of finding someone to mess around with just for a few hours, but no matter who he looks at, he can't stop thinking about Scott. He sends Crux a message that he's going back to the ship in case she gets bored with her new paramour and comes looking for him, then leaves the club.

He walks through the maze of passageways instead of taking the tram back to the docks, and his feet take him past Thrasia's shop, which still has a light on over the front counter. After a moment's consideration, Reyes pushes on the front door. It's unlocked.

"Reyes Vidal." Thrasia sticks her head out of the back room. "I was wondering if you'd ever stop by. Lock the door behind you."

"I hope you weren't waiting up for me."

They might have done business together some eight years ago, but that was eight years ago, and a lot has happened since then, and Reyes isn't armed save for a utility knife at his belt. He locks the door anyway and pulls the shutter down over the front window when Thrasia asks him to; if she'd wanted to kill him or claim the bounty on his head, there are much easier ways to do it than asking him to visit.

"Your friends were in here earlier asking about the Collective." Thrasia motions for Reyes to follow her through to the workshop. "An ex-agent and an angara. Kadara native, if I heard her accent right."

"It's been a long time since the Collective has had any real power on Kadara," Reyes says. "They've been having a hard time getting in touch with old contacts."

"Are you looking to join up, then? Or are you working a job?"

"What's it to you?"

"Just curious. Hope your plate's not too full, though." Thrasia pulls aside a huge cloth covering a Kodiak and opens the hatch of a compartment that is, to Reyes' knowledge, not part of its standard design. "Got a job for you."

"That's something you could have easily told Derc or Keema while they were here."

"I haven't worked with either of them before, and this is a delivery of some importance. You, I have worked with, and if the intel I have of your recent exploits is correct, this is something I can trust you with." Thrasia pulls a long rectangular package out of the Kodiak's hidden compartment. "You know Vetra Nyx, right?"

"We've done business a few times." Very illegal business nearly ten years ago, which is why they'd acted like they were meeting for the first time on the _Tempest_.

"Word is, she's a hard person to find these days. You manage to get this package to her, it'll be worth your while."

"Dare I ask what it is?" The package has some heft to it, but it's securely wrapped and there's not even a rattle when Reyes turns it over in his hands.

"Something that needs to be kept out of the hands of the kett, the Alliance, and any raiders or scavengers that might set their sights on having it."

"Is this hot?"

"Very. But it's clear of trackers, I checked it myself. I need it off the station as soon as possible, and I'd rather you handle the delivery instead of one of my usual couriers."

"Because if I get killed over it, you don't have to pay the courier company," Reyes says drily.

"Exactly. Nyx will pay you on delivery. And me, so try not to get killed. Oh, and I wouldn't try breaking into the case, if I were you; it's set to self destruct if tampered with."

-

Reyes intends on keeping the package in his room until he can get in contact with Vetra, but for the second time that night, his plans are dashed. This time, he hears Keema talking to someone on the bridge who's not Derc, and goes up to investigate.

"Here he is now," Keema says, turning around when she hears Reyes' footsteps on the stairs.

"Scott!" Reyes nearly drops the package still in his arms when he sees Scott's face on the screen. "Perfect timing, I have something for you."

"What is it?" Scott leans in.

"No idea. And it's for Vetra, actually. So if you'd be so kind as to let her know, we can work out the logistics of a delivery."

Scott nods and leaves to find Vetra.

"Where did you get that?" Keema asks.

"Thrasia. Apparently, she doesn't trust you and Derc with this job of utmost importance."

"But she trusts you?"

"To a degree."

Scott comes back not with Vetra, but Sara.

"That's for me," she says. "Part of my secret weapon."

"Don't ask," Scott says. "Even I don't know what it is."

"Big secret." Sara nods solemnly. "Drop it off…" she checks her omni-tool, "where we met last time, except further east. I'll leave a credit chit and a transmitter with the same frequency that you called the Resistance on."

"Are you still there?" Reyes asks hopefully.

"We're still in the neighbourhood, but we're about to leave; got other packages to pick up. We'll swing by for that one when we're back in the area. How's your part going?"

"It goes," Keema says. "Nothing to report yet."

"I suppose it wouldn't be that easy. Keep me posted!" Sara waves and leaves the conference room.

"Don't stay up too late," Keema says as she gets up from the pilot's chair and leaves Reyes alone on the bridge.

They've been apart less than two days so there's not much for Scott and Reyes to talk about, and the line's not secure so they can't even make small talk about where they are, but just a few minutes of exchanging sweet nothings with Scott is enough to lift Reyes' spirits.

Once they run out of things to talk about, they sit in silence for a moment, basking in the easy company they've found with each other over the last few months.

Then, off screen, someone calls for Scott, and he turns to yell back at them over his shoulder. "I'll see you soon," he says quietly, leaning a little closer to the camera. "I love you."

The word feels heavy on Reyes' tongue, so instead of saying it back he says, "You too."

Scott gives him a soft smile and turns off the camera.

-

Crux shows up in the galley just before breakfast and Lynx after, both of them wearing the same clothes they'd left in last night. Lynx actually has a lead on the Collective agent she's been trying to get in touch with, on the other side of the cluster posing as a miner on H-047c.

 _Defiance_ heads back to Mendradym first to drop off Sara's package. The credit chit she's left for them has a generous three thousand credits on it that gets split evenly amongst the crew. After that, they fly over to the neighbouring planet of Tunharaset to put some distance between themselves and the drop point before calling the number Thrasia had given them.

It goes straight to an answering machine that tells them in a synthesised voice to leave a name, number, and reason for calling. Keema gives out her name and position as _Defiance_ 's captain as well as one of the frequencies the bridge is tuned to at all times; they're wanted people already, and their notoriety could legitimise their request for contact in the eyes of whoever is playing at being the Charlatan.

Their call is returned while they're in FTL, 'the Charlatan' leaving a voicemail that Keema stays behind to reply to while Crux takes her place in the rendezvous with Lynx's contact. Reyes is playing shuttle pilot, which means he gets to sit in the airlock of the mining complex all by himself while Crux and Lynx go to the meet, though Crux has her comm on continuous transmission mode so he can be ready if trouble arises.

Lynx's contact Faral turns out to be an actual miner who tells them she's been sending the Charlatan large amounts of titanium dug from the mine in return for essentials shipped in from offworld. The titanium is being sent to the mining complex at Agneta Crater, which becomes their next stop.

Reyes gets relegated to babysitting the shuttle in the airlock again, but Crux and Lynx are permitted to pass through to the inside of the dome.

"So you're the people looking for the Charlatan," says a female voice Reyes swears he's heard somewhere before.

"Who is that?" Reyes hisses into his comm. "Ask for her name."

"We are," Lynx says. "I'm Lynx, this is Crux, and you are?"

"Elora. Follow me."

The name sends Reyes scrambling through old personnel files he'd put together on the who's who of Kadara back in his time as the Charlatan. It would be so much easier on a terminal, but all he's got is his omni-tool screen and the one-handed keyboard, so it takes him several minutes to get the spelling right and to scroll through the list of search results. Elora's file isn't long, but there's one very important note in it.

Over the comms, Reyes can hear Lynx and Elora talking to each other, but Crux must be lagging behind because Reyes can't make out a thing they're saying.

"Do you see a lot of uranium lying around the place?" he asks.

"You sure have a lot of uranium stockpiled here," Crux says conversationally.

"Is that important?" There's a dangerous edge to Elora's voice.

"You two should find a reason to leave," Reyes says. "They're building bombs."

"If you're looking for someone to move volatile materials offworld, we've had some experience," Crux says smoothly. "Uranium, too."

"I'll think about it," Elora says sharply, but at least she doesn't sound suspicious anymore.

There's no way for Crux and Lynx to organically leave the outpost without even entering into negotiations, but the longer they stay, the more likely they'll be railroaded into accepting a job they don't want to do. Reyes calls Lynx.

"Hey, sorry to interrupt, but the ship's having a little problem with bounty hunters right now, is there any chance we could dock it here to hide out for a bit?"

As expected, Elora vehemently denies the request. "Surely your ship can deal with the bounty hunters while we negotiate," she says.

"Wouldn't that be great?" Reyes says with a forced laugh. "But it's a six-crew ship, and half the crew's down here."

"If you leave now, don't expect to be let back in. "

"We'll find someone else to go to," Crux says. "Thanks for your time."

They take off in a hurry and head straight back to _Defiance_ , looking behind themselves the whole time to see if anyone's following.

"Bad meeting?" Keema asks after Reyes requests Derc make a hasty takeoff.

"Almost was. Our 'Charlatan'? I had some dealings with her back on Kadara. She was obsessed with the idea of bombing Initiative outposts, and her lifelong dream was to blow up the Nexus one day."

Back then, resources had been scarce enough that Reyes hadn't been worried about her being able to scrape together the materials to carry out her plan, but he'd put Elora's name into his records and marked her as someone to watch. Then the Collective had disbanded and Kadara had no longer been his problem, but sometimes, even raving lunatics make it offworld and to greater heights.

"And now she's masquerading as the Charlatan?" Keema asks.

"I'm not surprised; she did always seem like a bit of a control freak. How did yours go?"

Keema's meeting proved almost as fruitless, but the person she'd gotten in touch with seemed more suitable for the job than Elora, so at least it hadn't been a complete waste of time. What does sound like a complete waste of time is the delivery job they're being sent on as some kind of test, but since they don't currently have any other leads, they've got no choice.

"Reyes, why don't you have any Collective contacts?" Crux asks. "You used to spend a lot of time on Kadara, didn't you?"

"I do have contacts," Reyes says. "They're all on this ship." After disbanding the Collective, the first thing Reyes had done was reach out to its most competent but not too high-profile agents and offered them a job aboard _Defiance_. A few of them had turned him down to stay planetside, but he's quite satisfied with the crew he's ended up with.

"I'm surprised you weren't Collective, what with how much you enjoyed making trouble for Sloane," Nakamoto says.

"It's always good to make sure those at the top aren't too comfortable there. And I'd never halve my potential job prospects by picking a side."

"Of course you wouldn't."

-

Keema comes by Reyes' quarters later that evening, like one close call with a crazed bomb maker is going to make him change his mind.

"I can't believe people thought she could be the Charlatan." Keema helps herself to a seat at Reyes' desk.

"She must have quite the network of fanatics to be able to have kept the asteroid as well-supplied as it was."

"And the bomb-making materials she's stockpiled? What should we do about those?"

"That's a problem for someone else to solve. Say, a different Charlatan, one with a vested interest in how they measure up to someone else using the same name."

"You want to pit them against each other."

"And see who comes out on top, why not?"

"I'm thinking our best choice will end up being one not stupid enough to participate."

"Whatever criteria you want to judge our candidates by, don't you think it's a better idea than running from system to system chasing after rumours?"

"You know what's an even better idea than that? You step up to the job, and no one has to run anywhere."

"I don't see you being too eager to take the job either."

"The Collective was your—"

"Take it. I'll give it to you. Every file I ever put together, every contact I ever made. It's yours. People won't doubt you were the original Charlatan."

Keema stares unblinkingly at Reyes for a good minute, and he stares back out of spite.

"No," Keema finally says. "The Collective worked because you ran it from the shadows and I from the light. If you won't step back up to the job, find me someone who will." She sees herself out before Reyes can think of what to say to that.

"Fine!" he belatedly yells after her, just to get in the last word.


	13. The Charlatan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sara gets her Charlatan and Reyes gets his wish of finding someone competent to take over the Collective. Sort of.

Hidden in the southern corners of Gehenna Valley is a scavenger outpost that they've traced one of the supposed Charlatans to. No one is pleased to be back on Elaaden again, especially not so far from the nearest sources of food and water, but it's the best place to engineer a shootout on account of the ongoing gang wars having already desensitised Elaaden's residents to explosions and prolonged gunfire.

The outpost is the base of one Axius, no last name given, notorious gang leader and wanted exile. Multiple bounties have been posted on his head for attacking the outposts of other scavengers—and even the occasional Alliance transport—and leaving no survivors. It takes a certain level of cunning to have survived for this long on Elaaden in a position like his, and Reyes definitely thinks him capable of taking on the title of Charlatan. His ruthlessness, on the other hand, is something Reyes doesn't care for in a successor. Keema agrees, so their plan is to oust Axius from his base by throwing all the other self-proclaimed Charlatans at him. Whoever's successful in taking over the outpost will then be able to add the intelligence Axius has collected to their own knowledge, making them one of the most formidable information brokers in Heleus. That's the plan, at least. In reality, the candidates who've been lured to Elaaden to unknowingly participate in the competition don't inspire much confidence.

"How can so many of these people claiming to be the Charlatan never even set foot on Kadara?" Reyes shouts as he smashes the butt of his rifle into the face of a scavenger trying to climb over the barricade. He and Keema had hidden themselves in one of the outbuildings to keep an eye on things, but the scavengers had discovered them fairly early on when the shooting had begun.

"It's been eight years, Reyes, the Collective is more than just Kadara now."

Reyes scoffs. "Like they wouldn't flock back if they could; Kadara was the closest anyone managed to get to a golden world, and that's more true now than ever. At heart, the Collective is about building a better life on Kadara, and maybe we can eventually broaden our scope to include the whole cluster, but first, we need to take care of things back home, and more importantly, Sara needs someone who knows their way around the place, so it sure would help if the Charlatan had even been to Kadara just once."

Keema's smiling at him. Reyes shoots a scavenger trying to sneak up and stab her in the back.

"What?" he snaps.

"You said 'we'." Keema's looking far too pleased.

Reyes scowls. "Slip of the tongue."

"You can't fool me, I know you've been keeping tabs on Kadara ever since we left. Those files you sent me? I read them. Some are even up to date."

"Just because we don't live on Kadara anymore doesn't mean what goes on there doesn't affect us. If I get news, I add it to the file. It didn't make sense to start a new one." Things like how bad the factional tension on Elaaden is and whether salvage exports will be disrupted for a while, creating a void that freelance smuggling ships like _Defiance_ can fill, or whether Alliance patrols have been spotted in Govorkam's neighbouring systems which will mean direct flights only unless you're spoiling for a fight.

Keema rolls her eyes and shoots a sniper trying to get into position on the roof of the building across from them. "It's been weeks, Reyes. We've chased up every rumour worth hearing about the Charlatan and some that were barely worth a second glance because they happened to be close by, and not a single candidate has proved to be up to the task. In fact, we've even been actively reducing the pool of candidates." She gestures pointedly around them.

"And I have a solution to that," Reyes says. "You take the job."

"You're awfully eager to be rid of me."

"I could say the same about you."

A grenade lands between them, and Reyes dives into the storage room for cover while Keema rolls away and puts up a barrier.

"Do _we_ have any grenades in there?" Keema calls out.

There are some ammo cases on the lowest shelf by Reyes' feet, and one has two grenades in it, still packed in cans. Reyes pulls the box out and slides it across the ground towards Keema, almost taking a bullet to the head from another sniper who'd taken advantage of the grenade to move into position.

"Sniper!" Reyes yells.

Keema fires off a shot, and Reyes hears a body fall. He cautiously sticks his head out to see the sniper is down but still moving, and fires off another shot to take care of them before grabbing a box of thermal clips and re-joining Keema behind the barricade.

"Let's get out of here," Keema says as she tosses a grenade over the stack of crates in front of them. "We can come back when the dust settles and see who's still standing." She puts a finger to her comm. "Derc, where are you? It's getting tiresome down here."

"We're a little busy at the moment," Derc replies after a stretch of silence. "Once the shooting started down there, everyone up here also opened fire on each other."

The smoke and clouds of dust and sand being kicked up around the outpost prevent Reyes and Keema from getting a clear view of the sky, but if Derc is admitting to having difficulties, it must be bad up there.

"Fine, we'll just have to take care of things down here first."

Reyes gives Keema an incredulous look; there must be at least thirty scavengers left, not including the reinforcements that keep being dropped off by shuttle.

"We can either sit here and try not to die, or we can take a more proactive role in putting an end to things. And I know how much you hate waiting."

When Keema throws the second grenade, Reyes darts out from behind the barricade and snags a fallen sniper rifle, using its scope to search the base. His sights fall on another sniper atop a roof two buildings away and looking right at him. Reyes squeezes the trigger and tries to duck behind the barricade at the same time, the other sniper's bullet catching his shoulder before it thuds into the dirt behind Keema.

Keema whips around, sees that Reyes is still alive, and turns back. "How do you want to do this? Shall we circle around and pick them off from the outside, or charge headlong into the fray?"

"You know I love the direct approach, but I think thirty scavengers at once is a little much to be taking head-on even for you and me." Reyes ignores the burning sensation in his left shoulder—it hurts like hell but it's just a graze—and realigns the scope. The sniper is gone—either dead or taking cover—and there don't seem to be any more perched on the rooftops, so he resumes his previous goal of looking for something resembling a command centre that they can focus their efforts on. Something else catches his eye first. "Either way, we're going to need a better hiding spot." He slings the sniper rifle over his shoulder and picks up his assault rifle and a handful of thermal clips. "Axius just sent in a Hydra."

"That's great," Keema says. "Really," she adds off Reyes' skeptical look, "if we can blow it up, we'll take a good chunk of the outpost with it."

"But to do that, we'll need to hit the canister on its back. Preferably from a high vantage point."

"Let's get out of here, then."

Some of the gunfire from the other side of the barricade dies down as the scavengers scatter before the Hydra.

"Out the back," Keema says as the Hydra charges up its cannon.

They blast a hole in the back wall of the storeroom, taking advantage of the Hydra's cannon going off to mask the noise they're making. No one sees them run further into the outpost, taking cover behind shipping containers and staircases to avoid the bullets being blindly sprayed by the panicking scavengers.

In between running and dodging, Reyes notices that the top floor of one of the taller buildings in the outpost is bereft of guards. It's surrounded on all four sides by a walkway that's fenced in with solid steel, not open rails like on the other walkways. If they can get up there, it'll make for a good sniper nest.

He nudges Keema when they have a moment to breathe. "Up there."

She barely spares it a glance before saying, "We'll never make it."

"If we can get onto the roof of that building on the side and Derc can bring _Defiance_ around to lay covering fire, we can jump over, then we'll only have to fight our way up one floor."

Keema's shaking her head, but she comms Derc anyway, who still has two shuttles on his tail and is less than happy about the plan. It also sounds like he's roped Nakamoto into being his co-pilot, which can't be helping to ease the tension on the bridge.

"If we get shot down, I'll make sure everyone knows it was your idea," he says.

"It was Reyes' idea, actually."

" _Reyes_ ," Derc grumbles. "Of all—they're using armour-piercing rounds, you know. I'm sure there are holes all over the ship already."

"I'll fix her up, like I always do," Reyes says. "Watch out for the Hydra."

"The Hy—you're killing me."

Still, Derc brings _Defiance_ in with her guns blazing, a beautiful sight to behold that Reyes never gets to see from this side of her walls. He manages to snap a few pictures with his omni-tool before he and Keema have to take advantage of their window of opportunity to leap from the roof onto the walkway of the adjacent building.

The guards that had been posted there are preoccupied by the sudden aerial assault, and Reyes and Keema take them down without much difficulty.

"You're taking the front stairs," Keema says, not waiting for a reply before circling around to the back of the building.

Even though Reyes can't hear anything from above, he keeps his rifle at the ready as he climbs the stairs. The door at the top is locked, but it opens easily enough before the rudimentary hacking program in his omni-tool, revealing an empty room, roughly rectangular, bordered on three sides by banks of consoles and walls full of screens. Jackpot.

The room is clear, so he should really be setting up the sniper rifle to get a good shot at the Hydra, but Reyes' fingers itch to take a quick look through the information stored in the consoles. Keema's not here yet; it can't hurt to take a few seconds while he waits for her to join him.

"Reyes Vidal."

Reyes' hand freezes over the keyboard. He slowly turns and finds himself face to face with Axius, the spitting image of the picture in his Alliance arrest warrant. There's nowhere in the room he could have hidden where Reyes wouldn't have seen him, so he must have been using an Infiltrator's cloak.

"You know who I am?" Reyes asks.

"How could I not? You and your crew stirred up quite the trouble around the Paradise a few months ago. It caught the attention of more than just the kett and the Alliance." Axius gestures with his shotgun. "Put your gun on the floor and kick it over here."

Over Axius' shoulder, Reyes can see Keema through the rear window of the room, but he needs to keep Axius' attention on him if she's going to get closer. He slowly lowers his rifle to the ground and kicks it across the room. The noise as it skitters over the metal floor masks the sound of Keema climbing through the window. She takes aim with her rifle as Axius does the same with his shotgun.

"Wait!" Reyes throws up his hands to forestall both Axius and Keema. "Before you do anything you might regret, hear me out. I have a proposal for you."

"Email would've been better. I don't take kindly to trespassers." Axius raises his shotgun.

Reyes feels a barrier settle over him just before he drops into a roll, and the stray pellets that would have caught him bounce off harmlessly. His rifle is too far to reach, so Reyes goes for the pistol at his hip instead, and puts two shots into Axius' chest as Keema also sprays him full of bullets from the back.

"It was worth a shot." Reyes gives Axius a good shove with his foot to make sure he's not getting up, then picks up Axius' shotgun along with his own rifle. The shotgun's a custom build, and along with its backstory, will sell for a pretty penny elsewhere on Elaaden.

"Did you really think he would have listened?"

"Hey, we're all about second chances here. He blew his pretty quick, though." Still, for all the tactical knowledge Axius might have been able to bring to the table, of far greater value is the treasure trove of intelligence that's been left behind.

Reyes turns back to the console he'd been about to use before being interrupted by Axius' appearance, and scrolls through a list of interplanetary trade routes for everything from food and water to weapons and research material. On closer inspection, they appear to be _Alliance_ trade routes.

"We could use this for ourselves," Reyes says as familiar ship names and navpoints pass before his eyes. "This looks like every scheduled Alliance shipment on this side of the cluster. Look at that one, see what you can find." He points at the console next to him that's showing a list of what looks like comm frequencies.

"There are still some thirty-odd scavengers and a Hydra out for each other's blood down there and you want to download lists," Keema grouses.

"Alright, alright, let's take care of them first." Reyes starts the download process before swapping his assault rifle for the sniper rifle. "I'll get the Hydra, you pick off Axius' people who try to get up here to see what's going on."

The Valiant that Reyes is using might be considerably weaker than the Widow Scott favours, but it does have three shots to the Widow's one, and Reyes gets all of them into the canister on the Hydra's back. It staggers, tries to bring up the arm with the cannon, but by the time it does, Reyes has reloaded another thermal clip and taken aim again. Another three bullets into the Hydra's eezo core, and the view through the scope explodes into brilliant orange.

"Well?" Reyes asks Keema. "How did we do?"

"We've got most of them on the run, but it's hard to say whether we've scared them off for good or if they're falling back to regroup and wait for reinforcements. I'd suggest getting out while we can."

"Yes, I don't think any of the candidates are going to pan out if they're so easily beaten by just the two of us. Still, would be a shame to let all this intel go to waste." The trade routes have finished downloading; Reyes starts on the list of comm frequencies. "Let me grab what I can before we call Derc for a pickup."

"We should blow this place once we're done with it. I'll go look for explosives."

The comm frequencies are followed by a table of purchase orders and shipping manifests, then a folder of blueprints. Over the comms, Reyes hears Derc tell Keema that _Defiance_ will be on the way once the crew have taken care of the last shuttle following them. Keema answers in the affirmative, then comes back into the room with a crate of grenades.

"We should get onto the roof," she says. "Are you done yet?"

"Almost." They've still got a few minutes before _Defiance_ will swing by, which is plenty of time for Reyes to download the last of the not-so-important data like patrol rosters and illegal copies of Milky Way vids.

Derc brings _Defiance_ in low, her cargo bay doors open with Crux and Lynx laying covering fire from the sides. Reyes and Keema use their jump-jets to get up onto the extended ramp, then start tossing grenades at Axius' command centre to turn it into a smouldering ruin.

"Another bust?" Crux asks as they leave the outpost behind. "Are we still going to Rohvir? It feels like we're being led around in circles."

"Find me another lead, then," Keema says. "We promised the pathfinder the Charlatan, and we're going to give them to her. Where are you going?"

Reyes pauses on the second step. "To take a shower." He's covered in dirt and blood and has pieces of shrapnel stuck in his skin, and would rather not linger in the cargo bay rehashing an old discussion. "Is there a problem?"

"Just send me those files when you're done."

-

Reyes means to just send Keema the files, he really does, but he gets curious as to what kind of blueprints Axius had been able to get his hands on, and opens the folder to take a look. Most of them are implausible sketches of weapon upgrades that look to be more for show than improving performance, but what grabs his attention is a detailed twenty-page design for an ion drive, intended for use on slow, automated cargo barges transporting large amounts of low-value goods like garbage and scrap. The pages have been heavily annotated by multiple people, seemingly with the goal of adapting the drive for use in orbital solar arrays.

Judging from the last modified timestamp on the files, Axius hasn't looked at them in over year. Probably because there's no shortage of sunlight on the ground on Elaaden. On Kadara though, where sulphur gradually worms it way into anything left unshielded, having a power source located outside the atmosphere would solve the problem of not having enough engineers to keep up with maintenance.

Whoever had compiled the schematics would have needed large quantities of xenon for testing, which Reyes traces through the purchase orders to a station orbiting Grill in the Faross system, and also uncovers a supplier for molybdenum-tungsten alloys much sought after in engine manufacturing. He continues to comb through the network of contacts, adding names to the categorised lists he's been maintaining as _Defiance_ 's unofficial keeper of contacts; it always helps to know someone no matter where you are in the cluster.

When Keema knocks on the door to his quarters to ask after those files, it's been four hours since Reyes had come back from his shower with the intention of sending them to her.

"What are you doing?" Keema looks in amusement at the lists of numbers and names Reyes has up on his terminal screen.

He suppresses the knee-jerk urge to close the window like his CO's just caught him playing video games while on shift, and instead tries to put on an air of indifference. "Just looking for anything that could help us," he says nonchalantly.

"Really?" Keema comes closer. "Water silo manufacturer, all-terrain truck hire, _prefab factory_? When will we ever need to contact these people?"

"What, I can't just look?"

"You've saved them to your list, Reyes."

"We might need them someday." A thought occurs to him. "Sara might need them, for when she's building her base on Kadara," he says triumphantly.

"You—" Keema makes a noise of frustration. "You know what you're planning?"

"Oh? Enlighten me."

"You're going to find some poor gullible fool who can take on all the responsibility you're trying to avoid, and who'll roll over and let you backseat drive the Collective whenever you feel like it."

"Backseat drive? Where did you even learn that?"

"Angara have a saying for it too, but yours is more concise. Don't change the subject."

Reyes huffs. "I don't want to backseat drive the Collective, I want to find someone competent enough to lead it so I won't have to. I'm not turning all this information over to someone who won't know how to make good use of it."

"Right, that's why you've turned down all the perfectly capable candidates we've come up with so far."

"They were either idiots or psychopaths, Keema." There's something about leading a gang of outlaws that seems to attract people with those attributes. "There's already enough of those on Kadara, don't you think?"

"And how long will your search for the perfect replacement go on? The crew's getting restless, and Sara's not going to wait forever, she means to wage war."

"I know, I just…a little longer."

"Don't think about it too hard. I wouldn't want you to hurt yourself."

-

They spend another two weeks chasing down their other leads, or rather, being shunted back and forth across the cluster on 'missions' to 'prove their trustworthiness'.

"I don't see how this is getting us any closer to the Charlatan," Crux complains over the comms as she and Keema are flying back to _Defiance_. "We've spent weeks doing grunt work and not even gotten a glimpse of upper management. Or the idea that there even is one. I bet these 'representatives' are having a great time laughing to themselves while they send us off to run their errands."

Looking over their job history working for this 'Charlatan', Reyes is also starting to doubt if there's anyone at the head of the organisation at all. He knows people used to say the same thing about the Collective back when he'd been running things, but he can't find any evidence of this network working towards a cohesive goal; it looks to him more like a chain of smugglers and information brokers pointing job seekers each other's way, something Reyes is intimately familiar with after spending the last ten years inserting himself into such networks. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with them—besides skirting the edge of legality or downright operating outside the law—but it's not what the Collective stands for, and it rankles him to think it's been reduced to this.

"Keema?" he says, not bothering to switch to a private line.

"Yes, Reyes?" Keema's voice is flat and unamused. She hasn't quite resorted to openly glaring at Reyes whenever she sees him, but it's becoming a near thing.

"What do you suppose Sara's doing right now?"

-

Sara proposes a meeting on Havarl this time, probably so she can show off the effect the vault has had after being active for two months.

The last time _Defiance_ had actually touched down on Havarl had been several years ago atop a plateau surrounded by electric fencing so strong Reyes can still remember the buzz in his teeth as he'd stepped off the ship.

Their contact had explained it was to keep the landing zone safe from not only animals but also plants, which could swallow a ship the size of _Defiance_ in a matter of hours if not kept at bay. Her words had been accompanied by rustling in the background followed by a sizzling sound and the faint smell of smoke as vines attempted to climb the fence only to be burned off. Havarl was more alive than any other plant in Heleus, and it was downright unsettling.

Reyes knows activating the vault would have changed things, but he still can't help but keep an ear out for the jungle trying to eat _Defiance_ while they meet up with Sara at the Pelaav Research Station, the closest thing to a hub on this side of the planet outside of the Resistance outposts.

"Please tell me you come bearing good news." Sara looks exhausted but in good cheer, as does Scott, who gives Reyes a broad smile but doesn't close the distance between them yet.

"Let's go somewhere we won't be overheard," Reyes says, eyeing the researchers and labourers who've suddenly found work to do nearby.

"Conference room on the _Tempest_?"

"Galley on _Defiance_." Reyes suggests. "You'll want to be sitting down." That, and he doesn't want to deal with the _Tempest_ 's crew on top of everything else.

-

"So," he says once Scott, Sara, and all of _Defiance_ 's crew have settled down, "the Collective." Reyes drums his fingers on the tabletop before him. "Once upon a time," he begins.

"Ten years ago," Keema interrupts.

"Nine and a half years ago," Reyes says, just to be petty, "in the Govorkam system on a planet called Kadara, there were two major factions fighting over the only city worth fighting over: Kadara Port. There were the Outcasts, run by Sloane Kelly, former head of Nexus security, and the Collective, run by a shadowy figure people called the Charlatan, both of them with differing ideas of how things on Kadara should be run. For nearly a year, the Collective would push forward, the Outcasts would push back, and they'd fight each other out in the Badlands, but that was as far as things got. Well, some say the Charlatan was looking to move in on Sloane, but then the Nexus gave themselves over to the kett and priorities changed. Sloane turned her attention from taking down the Collective to fortifying the port against kett incursion, and the Collective scattered into the wind."

"I know this," Sara says. "I've been asking around too, and I've had dozens of people across the cluster tell me the same story."

"And what do they say about the Charlatan?"

"Now that's where the stories stop agreeing with each other. I've heard it all: they were killed, they didn't really disband the Collective, they were actually multiple people, they were an AI."

"Have you heard one where they were a smuggler on Kadara who, after disbanding the Collective, bought a ship, rounded up a crew, and took off to the far reaches of the cluster?"

"No, that's—" Sara cuts herself off and stares at Reyes for a long time.

He can also feel the stares of the crew boring into him, but he keeps his eyes on Sara and doesn't say anything.

"You're shitting me," she eventually says. "You've been letting us run around in the dark this whole time?"

"'Let' is such a strong word. I had no intentions of taking up the mantle again. In fact, we've been busy these last few weeks searching for a suitable replacement."

"And?"

"And now I see there's no other better suited to the job. Rather flattering, if mildly annoying. I'm busy enough as it is."

"And you'll stand by me?"

Reyes spreads his hands. "The Collective is at your disposal, Pathfinder. Provided they heed the call, that is. It _has_ been over eight years."

Sara nods thoughtfully. "Then with your permission, I'd like to install SAM on a terminal on _Defiance_. That way, we'll be able to instantly share whatever information we've discovered, and he can also help with other encrypted QEC transmissions, which you'll probably need to convince people you're the real Charlatan."

The contradiction of terms does not escape Reyes. "I have other ways of ensuring that, but SAM's help would be much appreciated nonetheless," he says after a quick glance at Keema doesn't show she disagrees. If anything, she looks more at ease than she has in weeks.

"I'll talk to SAM and get it worked out." Sara stands up but doesn't leave yet, her fingers tracing idle patterns on the tabletop. "I'll uh, have to tell the rest of the crew. That's okay, right?"

"They're your crew," Reyes says. He's got some explaining to do to his own.

Scott and Sara both leave the galley, but while Sara goes down the stairs to the cargo bay, Scott continues down the hallway towards Reyes' quarters. Reyes doesn't know what kind of conversation awaits him there, but he holds on to the fact that Scott chose to stay on _Defiance_ when leaving with Sara would have been just as easy. Before he gets to that conversation though, he has a few others to get through first.

"Well, it seems obvious now," Nakamoto says before he leaves without a backwards glance. Knowing him, he's just annoyed he didn't figure it out himself.

"Hm." Derc flicks his eyes back and forth between Reyes and Keema. "Always thought it might be you." His gaze settles on Keema.

"That would've been too easy." Lynx leans back in her chair and regards Reyes through narrowed eyes. "You've always known too much, even for a shuttle-pilot-turned-smuggler-turned-mechanic. When you asked me to join you on this ship, it sure as hell didn't escape my notice that over half of the crew used to be Collective. First, I thought you were just opportunistic. Then I thought this was some kind of front for the Collective, that the Charlatan was still operating in secret. Briefly entertained the idea you were working for Sloane. Eventually, I stopped caring so much. Eight years, and I still managed to have you figured out all wrong." Lynx is shaking her head, but it seems to mostly be aimed at herself.

Reyes smirks at her. "Glad I can still surprise you."

"Am I the only one who hasn't suspected my crewmates of hiding some big secret?" Crux asks.

"You're still young, even by human standards," Lynx says. "You'll learn to be less trusting." She stands up. "I'm going planetside. Anyone coming?"

"I'll come." Crux stands up as well.

"I might as well until they're done talking on the _Tempest_ ," Derc says. "If we're going to be working with them, maybe they'll spring for a few upgrades to _Defiance_."

"Good idea," Reyes says. "See if you can get them to throw in a stealth drive."

The three of them file down the stairs, leaving only Reyes and Keema in the galley.

"That went better than I expected," Reyes says.

"You didn't put together a crew of idiots," Keema says. "I would've been more surprised if they'd gone this long without questioning your story."

"Crux didn't."

"You're her friend; she trusts you. An unfortunate oversight, but I've seen her in the field. I trust her judgement on everything outside of the people on this ship. You didn't choose her in error." Keema casts a significant look down the corridor towards the bridge. "One more left."

Reyes breathes out slowly. "Here goes nothing."

-

When Reyes drops down the ladder into his room, Scott's lying on his bed reading through one of his datapads. From the empty spot on the shelf, Scott's picked up one of Reyes' reference datapads, crammed with enough (mostly useless) information to fill several incredibly dry textbooks on the subject.

"Find anything interesting in there?" Reyes asks as he lingers by the doorway.

"Mm, not really." Scott pats the empty space next to him as he sets the datapad down on the bedside table.

Reyes carefully lies down on the bed, and Scott wastes no time in getting comfortable on top of him.

"Tell me about the Collective," Scott murmurs, his head heavy and breath warm on Reyes' chest. "Sara makes it out to be some kind of mysterious underground spy network working to undermine the Outcasts, but she wasn't actually there."

"It was nothing of the sort." Reyes gently runs his fingers through Scott's hair, something he's missed being able to do in their vidcalls. "There were no big plans, no grand vision. Maybe if the Initiative had held out against the kett a little longer…we were just a group of people trying to survive, just like everyone else."

Scott makes a small huff of disbelief. "Tell me about the Charlatan, then."

"He was just a man, hopelessly out of his depth."

"That's not what I've heard."

"Then you heard wrong. I happen to know the Charlatan quite well. Can your source say the same?"

"I suppose not. So tell me, what's he like now?"

"Well, he's still just a man, but he's a little older, ever so slightly wiser. A little more aware of what's at stake, what he's got to lose. A little more willing to hold on to the things he cares about." Reyes presses a kiss to the top of Scott's head.

"Why did you stop?" Scott asks. "The Collective were the only ones standing up to the Outcasts. You've seen what the Port's like today, what—"

"Things were bad, Scott," Reyes interrupts him, "when we first caught the kett's attention. It was more than I'd signed up for. Hell, the Collective was more than I'd signed up for. This business with pathfinders and making a stand against the kett? It's not like me at all."

"But you're going to try."

"Damn if I'm not going to try." Reyes pulls Scott up for a kiss. "I've got too much to lose now."

-

Scott stays the night. Reyes wakes up first the next morning, not so early that it would be inappropriate for him to sneak out of bed and into the galley to make coffee and breakfast for Scott to wake up to.

He gets a pot of coffee brewing in the machine then rifles through the pantry for a minute before remembering they're parked planetside in a friendly outpost, and that it would be a much better breakfast treat to go out and get something fresh. There's no point in letting perfectly serviceable coffee go to waste though, so he grabs two mugs and waits for the machine to finish.

"How'd he take it?" Keema appears seemingly out of nowhere and Reyes' hand jerks, spilling coffee over the counter.

"We talked," he says as he sets the pot down and fetches a cloth from the sink to wipe the counter.

Keema waits until he's cleaned the counter and rinsed the cloth and doesn't have an excuse not to look her in the eye to say, "And?"

"We talked," Reyes says again as he picks up both mugs of coffee. Keema might be the closest friend he's got, but he could be on his deathbed and he'd never tell her how strongly he feels the desire to give Scott the world. He'd bring Scott the Archon's head on a pike if it would bring him a moment's happiness. Though with the way things seem to be headed, that might actually become a real possibility. "Goodbye."

Reyes starts heading back to his room, but he and Keema are alone in the galley and it sounds like no one else is up yet, and there's something he's been meaning to ask her. "Keema?" He turns around at the threshold.

"What?" She'd been pouring herself a cup of coffee, but she sets down the pot and gives Reyes her full attention again like she knows he's about to bring up something serious. Her preternatural instincts always make it hard to surprise her.

"The Collective will need someone on the ground, on Kadara. We won't survive long as a faceless organisation, not against Sloane and everything she's done to keep Govorkam safe from the kett all these years."

"You want me to be the face of the Collective."

Before, Keema had never openly stated her allegiance, but Reyes needs to know there's someone he can trust to put in the spotlight.

"Kadara Port was once an angaran town."

"You mean to prop me up as a figurehead."

"In part. And only if you think it's a good idea."

"I do."

They look at each other across the galley.

"Congratulations," Reyes says drily. "You got what you wanted."

Keema doesn't even try to suppress her smug grin as she finishes pouring out her coffee.


	14. Defiance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sara and her new team make their first stand against the kett.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not-exactly-spoiler warning for one of the MEA tie-in novels in the end notes.

Kadara Port doesn't change hands so much as the Collective moves in and refuses to leave. It starts with the traffic controllers, forging entry permits and paving the way for communications and supply officers, who hide the movement of people and goods once they get planetside.

Reyes watches all this from _Defiance_ 's new operations control centre, a passenger cabin converted to house a wall full of screens, under which sits a bank of consoles; a table in the centre of the room with a holoprojector and vidcon unit; and a long desk littered with datapads and printouts.

SAM handles access control and keeping the screens of ongoing operations updated, and is always available to talk to from the terminal that's been installed at one end of the desk. Reyes uses it mainly for SAM's QEC capabilities to give orders while _Defiance_ is jetting about the other side of the cluster, but SAM also monitors Collective communications to ensure no one is trying to listen in on their secure lines, and makes the occasional suggestion on where to allocate resources and personnel.

There comes a day several weeks after they'd first put their plan into action when the Collective is as deeply entrenched in Kadara Port as it can be without overtly taking over that Sara announces her secret weapon is ready to go the moment it's safe to deploy it in Govorkam.

_Defiance_ is the first to test the waters, arriving in the system unannounced save for Reyes arranging her safe passage with the Collective. No one shoots at her or rushes to arrest the crew when they dock, and there's no indication from the channels SAM is listening in on that the Outcasts suspect anything is amiss. Reyes gives Sara the all clear, and she tells them to sit tight and ready the welcome party.

_Defiance_ is in orbit around Kadara when it happens, Reyes waiting in the co-pilot's chair on the bridge hoping that the _Tempest_ will emerge from FTL with a fleet of gunships behind her, but this…this is even better.

Sara's secret weapon is the _Keelah Si'yah_ , the ark that launched a year late and arrived…who knows when. There have been no shortage of rumours about an ark seen drifting through the cluster's more remote systems, and about distress signals supposedly from the _Keelah Si'yah_ being picked up on old Initiative frequencies. But until now, no one has been able to definitively say that they've made contact with or seen the ark with their own two eyes. The way Reyes figures it happened, the _Si'yah_ arrived in Heleus, sent out scout teams to find out what was going on, and decided not to show their faces after learning about the kett. But here they are now, the quarians, elcor, drell, volus, batarians, and hanar, following the flag that Sara's flying.

"Now where did you pick up something like that?" Reyes asks once the initial shock has worn off.

"Out in Shojoan." The glee in Sara's voice is hard to miss. "I offered them non-combatant roles and a place to stay in exchange for their help. You don't mind, do you?"

"I think we can scrounge up a few extra beds."

Most of the _Si'yah's_ colonists are still in cryosleep, those that hadn't died as a result of the plague that had ravaged through the ship some forty years ago, Reyes learns. Only a small command team, the Quorum, has been awake the past six years, searching for a planet to call their own, or at least a safe place to make port for a little while. Kadara can be both, for now.

The _Tempest_ docks with the _Si'yah_ so that Sara can meet with the Quorum and discuss their next steps, though Reyes suspects the meeting is really for his benefit, since Sara must have already hashed it all out with them before they'd agreed to come here. He gets patched in via vidcall, his voice distorted and his holographic projection nothing more than blue static to preserve his anonymity. Sara introduces him to the motley collection of six species Reyes hasn't laid eyes on in over a decade—his heart seizes with a pang of nostalgia—who regard him in return with varying degrees of suspicion. He can deal with that.

"Before any of the real work can begin, the _Si'yah_ 's colonists will need to be revived," Sara says. "There are enough beds on the ark for them all until housing can be set up planetside, but they'll need food."

"Not a problem," Reyes says. Food security had been at the top of his list for preparation in case of a retaliation strike, and he'd already had the Collective hit several of the Alliance trading routes he'd acquired from Axius. With the stockpiled reserves and what few greenhouses the Outcasts have managed to build over the years, it'll be enough to tide them over until the cryobays in the ark can be converted to hydroponic gardens.

"My people will be revived first, of course," the volus representative says. "There is none better than a volus to oversee manufacturing processes."

"Let's not forget that it's the quarians who are the real engineers here." The quarian representative is quick to chime in. "You won't have anything to oversee if we don't build it first."

"Why not start with the batarians? Our numbers are the fewest; we could all be revived in a day."

"Respectfully: batarians also have the fewest skills applicable to—"

"Respectfully my _ass_ —"

"This one believes—"

"The drell have—"

"Everyone will be revived!" Sara has to shout to be heard over the cacophony. "And it won't be done by species, it'll be done by skillset. Yes, we need engineers first. But not just quarian engineers, all engineers. Then the techs, the soldiers, the merchants, and whoever else we need as we come to it. But they _will_ all be revived. For now, can we please wake all the doctors who've been assigned to the cryobays so that we can start with the first wave that we agreed on two weeks ago?"

There's some disgruntled mumbling and dirty looks that are cast around, but eventually, everyone nods and leaves the conference room.

Sara sits back in her chair with her hands over her face, and sighs heavily.

"Ah, bureaucracy," Reyes says fondly. "Definitely haven't missed this."

"We need to get to the Nexus as soon as we can," Sara says. "I can't wait for this to become someone else's problem."

"If anyone on the Nexus was remotely good at their job, we wouldn't be in this mess."

"Some of them weren't so bad." Sara puts her hands down. "Ambassador Kesh, for one."

"Kesh? She's still around?" Reyes remembers her as a stabilising presence on the Nexus before the uprising, one of the few sensible, level-headed individuals in the Nexus leadership.

"Yeah. You remember Drack, from my crew? She's his granddaughter. She knows more about the Nexus' goings-on than even my father, and she's been helping to put together a resistance force to stand against the kett when we finally bring the fight there."

The thought of taking the Nexus back from the kett really puts things into perspective for Reyes. If they succeed, it'll truly be a sign that the kett are fallible and that this crusade of Sara's might actually be capable of driving them from Heleus.

"Finally, huh? So where do you want to start?"

"Right here."

One good thing about Kadara Port being formerly run by Sloane is that there aren't many improvements left to be made to its defences, even after the quarians give the existing installations an inspection and some intrepid batarians perform an unauthorised 'stress test' that mostly serves to stress out the port authorities. Still, the elcor lend their knowledge of combat VIs for the port turrets and orbital weapons platforms, and the brightest minds of the _Keelah Si'yah_ put their heads together to design a planetary defence cannon much like the one the krogan have at New Tuchanka.

With the volus running logistical support and most of the Collective's focus turned from stockpiling supplies to procuring materials and equipment for the cannon, it goes up in the Badlands much quicker than Reyes would have thought possible before seeing how everyone has come together to make it happen. When Sara orders a trial run, the resulting shockwaves shake the very foundations of the port, and everything comes to a brief standstill as everyone gazes in awe at the horizon lighting up in bright blue. The Collective experiences an uptick in recruitment after that.

Sloane still sits her throne and commands an admirable force of Outcasts, but she knows that to act out against the Collective now would be career suicide. As long as she stays quiet, no one will make noise about unseating her.

Reyes doesn't make any effort to contact Sloane, and ignores all attempts at negotiating or coming to a compromise that she broadcasts on open channels. She'd had her chance to play a major role in the turn of history they're about to make, and she'd squandered it in favour of retaining the status quo. Ironic, given that she'd spearheaded the last uprising, but some people are only good at one thing.

Once the safety of Kadara is assured, Sara activates the remnant vault buried deep beneath the foothills north of the port. She gives it a week, lets people watch the water purity levels slowly climb and confusedly discuss theories amongst themselves, then she makes her first public appearance that's broadcast across Govorkam. _Defiance_ has only just docked in the port, and the crew gather around the projector in the galley to watch her speech.

"People of Andromeda." Sara's out somewhere in the Badlands wearing a pathfinder hardsuit in its original Initiative colours—the kett had quickly converted everything to drab, dark colours after taking over—helmet tucked under her arm. "My name is Sara Ryder, and I am the human pathfinder. First, I want to acknowledge those who came before: those who gave their lives in the line of duty, and those who were killed to ensure we would have no other recourse but to rely on the kett to ensure our survival. Today, I stand before you to tell you that this is no longer our only option. We've learned much these last ten years, enough for us to stand on our own feet."

The camera pans across the landscape as Sara continues talking. She's near one of the remnant pillars, in a rare pocket of the Badlands without an outlaw camp in sight.

"Those who came before us, before even the angara, left us the means to combat the damage wrought by the Scourge on our golden worlds. With the help of SAM, an AI, I have successfully activated a remnant vault here on Kadara, which has been terraforming the planet for the past week. Water toxicity levels have been dropping steadily, and within another week, we will be able to start growing our own food. Kadara will be entirely self-sufficient, with no need to rely on outside trade to meet our basic needs. We will truly be a free planet in every sense of the word." Sara spreads her arms out wide. "Join us. I will await your arrival, here on Kadara." The camera turns off.

The video will serve as encouragement for those looking to join Sara's cause, and as a challenge for those in opposition. Reyes only hopes they've done enough to prepare for both.

"Well said," Keema says. "We'd best ready ourselves for the onslaught that's sure to come."

SAM distributes recordings of the broadcast to the remote corners of the cluster inhabited by colonists thrown into the deep end and left to fend for themselves. The people of Govorkam do the rest, sharing their own recordings on the public extranet and getting in touch with their contacts outside the system.

When Reyes walks through the port with Scott that evening, everywhere they go, the word _pathfinder_ is on everyone's lips, whispered with awe and tentative hope. There's life behind their eyes where there was once barely the will to keep going, and an electric buzz in the air that's only partially related to the moonshine the hanar apothecarists have been brewing. Seems like Heleus hasn't given up yet.

-

The kett brought three dreadnoughts with them to the cluster. Not a week after Sara's broadcast goes live, one arrives in Govorkam, accompanied by an Alliance carrier. The early warning system gives Reyes a few hours to prepare the Collective for its first major battle—not what anyone had signed up for, but they've all had to adjust—while Sara has civilians evacuated to the _Keelah Si'yah_ and the ark moved far away from Kadara to make it a less attractive target.

Within minutes of arriving in the system, the dreadnought and the carrier have deployed hundreds of fighters and dropships. The mines and satellite weapons platforms take care of most of them, but those that make it through that first line of defence present not an inconsiderable opposition for the Collective fleet—a generous denomination for the assortment of shuttles and transports they've been able to attach weapons to—and the handful of Resistance frigates Evfra had eventually sent after a three-hour closed-door meeting with Sara that Reyes has heard involved a lot of shouting on Sara's part.

After lengthy discussions with the crew a few days prior, _Defiance_ has joined the thick of battle while the _Tempest_ hangs back, namely because the latter has no weapons and is too fragile to jury rig something like they've done with the other ships. And any morale boost it might give their forces to see the pathfinder flying with them is miniscule compared to the hit the whole cluster will take if the _Tempest_ goes down so early in the war they're about to wage. Scott has reluctantly stayed behind with Sara since there's nothing he can do to help on _Defiance_ , and it gives Reyes peace of mind to know that he'll be out of danger as long as the Collective can hold the line.

They were never going to win through sheer force of numbers, so the Collective's strategy—Reyes' strategy—is to play it smart, defending the weapons platforms and leading the kett and Alliance fighters towards them to be picked off one by one, and employing trick flying manoeuvres to cause the enemy ships to inadvertently take each other out. They've had less than two weeks to practise, but most of the pilots had turned to smuggling, salvaging, and other extra-legal pursuits after the Collective had disbanded, and Reyes trusts in the skills they've acquired over the past eight years to see them through this fight.

_Defiance_ has been outfitted with shiny new guns that are guaranteed not to explode in the course of normal usage, and the latest targeting software that gives the co-pilot more control over the guns, removing the necessity for a dedicated gunner on each side and freeing up Lynx to complete mid-battle repairs while Crux co-pilots and Reyes runs the show from the control centre.

With a generous amount of assistance from SAM, of course. Since Sara's not in the line of fire, SAM can dedicate the majority of his processing power to helping Derc and Crux identify threats to _Defiance_ , and to pointing out the holes in the kett and Alliance strategies that Reyes passes on to the rest of the fleet to exploit.

But even with the most advanced AI in the galaxy on their side, the invading force slowly but surely whittles down the Collective fleet and inches towards Kadara. Their last resort is to use the planetary defence cannon once either the dreadnought or the carrier comes into range, but the cannon can only fire off one shot before it has to be taken offline to cool down and recharge. A single shot will destroy the carrier no matter where it lands, but the dreadnought presents the greater threat, and it'll take a combination of precise aiming and extremely good luck to take it out in one hit. If the fleet can't win this battle for Kadara, maybe it'll be enough to do as much damage to the dreadnought as they can before falling.

Reyes watches the battle play out before him from a dozen camera feeds that SAM is projecting onto the screens in the command centre, waiting for the right moment to give the order. Too early and he risks lining up all their ships for easy pickings; too late and there might not be enough of them left to make a dent in the dreadnought's armour.

Before the moment arrives, something interesting on one of the camera feeds catches Reyes' eye.

"Keema, check out the feed from any of the starboard cameras and tell me if you see what I'm seeing."

The Alliance carrier has stopped. Stopped moving, stopped firing, and even its shields seem to be down. It doesn't look damaged enough to have shut down completely, but maybe one of the ships had gotten in a lucky shot.

"What's it doing?" Keema asks over the comms.

"Our scanners are saying it's—no, it's powering up again," Crux says.

With Herculean effort, the carrier slowly turns so that its single forward-facing gun is aimed at the dreadnought's open flight deck. Before the kett can seal it, the carrier fires, and at such a close range, the slug rips through the dreadnought with enough force to come out the other side and clip an Alliance frigate before hurtling off into space. The dreadnought is impaired, but not yet crippled. Its port swivel guns turn on the carrier.

Reyes slams his hand down on the comm button that will broadcast his voice to the fleet. "All units in the vicinity to focus fire on the dreadnought," he orders.

_Defiance_ adds her guns to the fray while the carrier charges up for another shot. Its shields take a battering as the kett realise their ally has changed sides, and it turns slightly from side to side and the flight decks open and close as its crew work through whatever internal power struggles are taking place right now, but eventually it gets its gun aimed again, and destroys what's left of the dreadnought's main systems.

"This is Captain Nozomi Dunn, commanding officer of the carrier _Ascendant_ ," a female voice broadcasts on the open channel. "All Alliance ships are to open fire on the kett. I say again, all Alliance ships are ordered to open fire on the kett, effective immediately."

There are three distinct reactions from the Alliance ships that Reyes can see: they stop, confused; they ignore the order and continue firing on the Collective; or they turn on the kett with a gleeful vengeance. Most are in the last group.

The dreadnought doesn't go down without a fight, but it can't stand against the combined might of the Collective and the Alliance; once its guns are taken out of action, all that's left is to focus on the fighters and dropships, about half of which had been destroyed with the dreadnought, leaving the rest woefully outnumbered. The kett don't know the meaning of surrender though, so it's a fight to the bitter end until their last ship has been defeated.

When the fighting settles, there's a palpable tension between both sides—and the third side of Alliance that hadn't turned against the kett, but their numbers are too small to present considerable threat and they know it and are behaving themselves—but not a single ship has reached Kadara. The first battle of the war goes to them.

-

"Captain Dunn, this is the Charlatan, sovereign of the Govorkam system," Reyes says once the victorious cheers have died down. "Bring your ship into orbit around Bakker and we can discuss the terms of you and your crew's defection."

"Very well," the captain replies.

Reyes doesn't give any further orders until he sees the carrier move towards the nearby planet of Bakker, after which he sends half the remaining Collective fleet back to Kadara for R&R while the rest remain to keep an eye on the _Ascendant_ and the dreadnought carcass. Sara's already organising crews from the _Keelah Si'yah_ to strip it of useful components, and retrieval teams to bring in the still-serviceable fighter crafts to be repaired and refitted and added to their fleet.

"I'll need someone to come on board the _Ascendant_ with me as the Charlatan's representative," she says, in between giving instructions to the salvage crews.

Crux flies Keema over once they see Sara's shuttle approaching the carrier. While they're getting into position, Reyes has SAM pull up the personnel files of all officers aboard the _Ascendant_.

"Captain Dunn." On the live audio-visual feed from the _Ascendant_ 's cameras that SAM's providing Reyes, Sara greets a nondescript human female in an Alliance uniform bearing captain's rank insignia. "Sara Ryder, pathfinder."

"Pathfinder Ryder." The captain holds out a hand that Sara shakes. "You wouldn't be Alec Ryder's daughter by any chance, would you?"

"You knew my father?" Sara's pathfinder facade falters briefly as Dunn goes off script.

"I was the captain of the _Hyperion_. Your father and I worked together for a time in the Initiative before his AI project fell through."

Reyes brings up Dunn's file, and sure enough, under Positions Held is _Andromeda Initiative, Captain - Ark Hyperion, 2184 to 2819_.

"Why did you turn on the dreadnought?" Keema's always asking the important questions.

Dunn gives her a wry smile. "My job was to bring twenty thousand colonists from the Milky Way to their new home in Andromeda. The way I see it, that job isn't done yet. Ever since we arrived in this forsaken galaxy, every day has been a struggle. When Tann announced the Initiative was surrendering to the kett, I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about starting a mutiny of my own. But it wouldn't have been fair to ask people to follow me when I had no way of guaranteeing their survival, so I thought my best bet would be to play along in the Alliance and scope out as many like-minded people as I could."

"And how many of these like-minded people have you been able to find?"

"Hundreds, across different ships, outposts, even on the Nexus. I can't promise they'll all take up arms if I call on them, but though the _Ascendant_ may be your first defectors, I assure you we won't be the last."

"That's exactly what we were hoping," Sara says. "Govorkam can hold you all until we get the defectors separated from the loyalists and see who wants to fight. We'll need people to protect the other systems from the kett, but we also need to launch offensive strikes and actively recruit if we want to get ahead."

"The Collective can handle recruiting," Keema says. "News of our victory here will make it easy."

"The kett might also hit another world in retaliation," Dunn warns them.

"We know," Sara says grimly; Eos had been a constant in the forefront of everyone's minds as they'd made their plans. "We've taken measures to ensure the likes of Prodromos won't happen again."

Across the cluster, strike teams that have been lying in wait for the victory signal from Govorkam will be moving in on their targets: command centres, supply depots, exaltation facilities. These teams are composed of Resistance, Collective, and specialised combat forces from the _Keelah Si'yah_ that had volunteered for the job. They might not be able to win any battles of their own, but if they can distract the kett from civilian targets, maybe even slow them down a little, it'll be enough.

"You seem to have everything well in hand," Dunn says. "My people are yours to command. Stars be bright for you, Pathfinder."

Glad as everyone is to have Dunn and the _Ascendant_ on their side, it's going to take time to vet everyone and check over the new ships and tech in their possession for any nasty surprises that might be lying in wait. And even then, it still won't be enough for them to go up against the other two dreadnoughts. Once word spreads of how they've achieved their victory here, the kett will be sure to keep a closer eye on who they trust, and to bring more forces to bear the next time they come up against Sara and the Collective.

"We proceed as planned," Sara tells Reyes and the Quorum at their next meeting. "First Voeld, to free up Resistance forces so they can join us, then the Nexus, before the kett know what's hit them."

"There'll be a dreadnought guarding the Nexus for certain," Reyes says, "and the Resistance, while capable, is largely comprised of ground forces. Good for holding outposts and helping us keep the Nexus in our hands once we take it, but to win in the first place, we'll need more ships."

"SAM's still scanning the dreadnought we took down, but he thinks he can write a virus to infect the kett ships and tip the scales in our favour. We'll need a covert infiltration team to get the virus into place."

"You'll have it." Covert is what the Collective does best. It'll be a relief to leave behind this 'save the galaxy' stuff and go back to working behind the scenes.

"Any other problems besides 'it's too hard and we'll never make it'?" Sara asks. "You all knew that when you signed on."

There are a few grumbles around the table, but most of the debate had been exhausted in the preceding two hours which had been spent mostly on arguing over the best way to determine the trustworthiness of their new and upcoming defectors. Everyone's arguments are spent now, and they look about as ready to get out of this meeting as Reyes feels.

"One last thing, then: if we're going to be making a name for ourselves in Heleus, we're going to need, well, a name. Ideas, anyone?"

"Why waste a perfectly good name that everyone is already familiar with?" Reyes has been thinking about this since Sara's speech the previous week. "We are, and have always been, the Andromeda Initiative."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter and upcoming chapters contain references to characters and events from the novel _Mass Effect Andromeda: Annihilation_. Besides the characters, I don't think there's anything you can't find out by reading the novel's blurb, but I thought I'd give anyone who was thinking of reading it a heads up. And if you weren't, I highly recommend checking it out anyway, it's a great read.


	15. The Andromeda Initiative

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The newly re-formed Initiative teams up with the Resistance and takes the offensive.

It's been a trying week, and by the looks of things, it's not about to get better just because they've traded Kadara for Voeld.

"Your people are not welcome to land at the base, Charlatan," Evfra says in one ear.

"We haven't been able to manufacture as much blue paint as I would've liked, so I was thinking we'd go for stripes rather than blocks of colour, what do you think, Reyes?" Sara says in the other ear.

"This had better not go on for much longer, we're needlessly burning fuel up here," Derc says over the intercom.

"We might be allies for the time being, but don't think I've forgotten from whence the Collective came." Even after all these years, Evfra still holds a grudge against the angaran deserters and scavengers who live on Kadara, and those who willingly live alongside them.

"The assembly line for our new uniforms starts up this afternoon so I need to make a decision, but can't help but wonder if we should hold out for more supplies and just start with a small first batch," Sara continues.

"The storm's also getting worse," Derc adds, "but if I take her above the clouds, we'll have even less fuel left for holding."

Scott appears in the doorway. "You've been up for nearly twenty-four hours, shouldn't you go get some sleep?"

Reyes gives him a long-suffering look before taking a deep breath. "I'm sure blue stripes would look great, Sara," he quickly says before hanging up on her. "Commander, need I remind you that the Collective is answering _your_ request for assistance. If you insist on keeping my agents in a holding pattern indefinitely instead of giving them clearance to land, I will simply ask them to leave," he tells Evfra.

"The deal I struck was with the Pathfinder, not the Charlatan."

"And the Pathfinder will come, as she has promised, but until the Alliance defectors are cleared for duty, the Collective remains her only substantial source of combat forces to draw from. Now, if you find my people unsatisfactory and you'd like me to send back to Kadara for engineers and biologists from the _Keelah Si'yah_ , that can be arranged, but—"

Evfra cuts in with coordinates for a landing zone at Techiix that Reyes curtly acknowledges before passing them on to Derc, who complains about having to wait so long only to be redirected like it's Reyes' fault Evfra had gone back on his word to let the Collective land directly at the Resistance base. If Evfra wants to send his people all the way out to Techiix to coordinate the skirmish missions with the Collective instead of having all his resources on hand at the base, that's his prerogative. Reyes has brought _Defiance_ here, like he'd promised Sara, and now he's long overdue for a hot shower and long nap.

"Long day," Scott comments as they walk back to Reyes' quarters.

"Long week," Reyes replies. "Long…remind me, when did we meet again?"

Scott elbows Reyes in the side.

"And it's only just beginning." _Defiance_ 's clocks say it's late at night, but the view outside the windows says early morning. Interstellar jetlag is the worst.

Scott hums in agreement. "The whole day will be a write-off for the crew, I take it? So nobody will mind if we take a few hours for ourselves?"

Between the Collective, the Resistance, the Alliance, and the Initiative, Reyes' attention has been pulled in fifty different directions at once for the past week, and not one of them has been Scott. Reyes can't fault him for wanting to be in the spotlight for a little while.

"They might, but I don't care. I'm all yours."

Scott's half undressed on Reyes' bed when he gets back from his shower, and Reyes eagerly leaves his towel and change of clothes by the door in favour of joining Scott. They've barely gotten further than trailing light kisses over each other's bodies when Reyes' omni-tool on his desk buzzes.

 ** _A priority call for the Charlatan from the Haarfel factory_** , Sam announces.

Reyes groans; they're all priority calls nowadays. Still, he'd known what he was signing up for when he'd agreed to take on the job again, so he gets up to put his earpiece in and take the call.

A fault in one of the machines has caused a small explosion in the factory, rendering almost a quarter of it unusable until the debris is cleared away, the electricians have repaired the exposed wiring, and the technicians have fixed whatever was wrong with the machine in the first place. The foreman on the other end of the line rambles nervously about extending shifts and outsourcing intermediate components until Reyes interrupts to tell him to just shuffle the production schedule.

"Yes to the shield generators, hold off on the pylons, and add the disruptor ammo to the queue, but don't start on it until we've hit our target for the twenty mils." Reyes waits for an acknowledgement from the foreman, then promptly hangs up.

He sets the notifications on his omni-tool to silent instead of just vibrate, then rejoins an endlessly patient Scott in the bed.

 ** _Reyes_** , SAM pipes up after a few minutes, heedless of the setting on Reyes' omni-tool.

"Take a message," Reyes growls. He pulls the covers up over himself and Scott as if it'll stop his lieutenants and seemingly every other person in the cluster from bugging him with every insignificant problem they encounter.

It works for a few hours, then SAM wakes him to deal with a recon team that's missed three consecutive check-ins and was last heard from somewhere near Alliance territory. At least SAM sounds apologetic about it, as much as an AI can.

-

Sara arrives on Voeld two days later, _not_ jetlagged, because she'd had the foresight to have SAM gradually adjust the _Tempest_ 's day-night cycle to eventually sync up with Voeld's. The _Tempest_ also gets to land at the Resistance base, and whatever Sara says to Evfra is enough to get him to cave slightly and send a shuttle to Techiix to pick up the Collective command staff, which in this case consists of Reyes, Keema, the captains of the four other ships which had accompanied them, and Scott, who is technically affiliated with the Initiative.

When they arrive in the war room, it's to Evfra and Anjik ganging up on Sara in yet another argument. It's a wonder they've even managed to agree on anything to get this far.

"The only one who needs to get up there is SAM, and I'm sorry, but I'm not handing him over to your people," Sara's saying. "You can send your commandos up too if that's what you really want, but in the heat of battle, I don't think anyone's going to be waiting around for the whole party to get together before moving on."

"Is there a problem?" Reyes asks.

"Evfra doesn't like the idea of you and Scott being in the observation room alone."

"Him?" Evfra's already-sour expression grows more acidic.

"I said Scott and a pilot. Reyes is a pilot."

"Problem?" Reyes directs the question at Evfra.

Evfra ignores him in favour of asking Sara, "What guarantee do we have that the Collective or the Initiative will not try to take the base for themselves once they are in control of all its systems?"

"I _promised_ ," Sara says. "You're telling me that's not enough? When have I ever lied to you?"

"Everyone is telling the truth until they lie."

"That's—you're paranoid, and I can understand why. But look at it this way: even if your people were in that room, do you think they can act faster than SAM? If I wanted SAM to take over that base for me, he would, and there would be nothing you could do about it since you need him to shut down the thing in the first place."

It's far from the most diplomatic answer, and Reyes can see even Anjik getting agitated.

"What do you think the Collective is going to do with a former kett base on Voeld?" he intercedes. "They've barely got enough people to spread around on Kadara let alone defend something as big as that from the kett _and_ from you."

"The Initiative also has no interest in Voeld beyond maybe setting up a small outpost in the future to bolster the relationship between our people," Sara adds. "We want the Nexus, and we can only get that with your help, so you can rest assured that we won't be doing anything to piss you off in the meantime."

Evfra harrumphs, but he's not looking as suspicious as he was a minute ago. "Tell the Charlatan that I want, in writing, a formal declaration of the Collective relinquishing all claims on Voeld. Before nightfall."

"I'll pass on the message."

-

Sara's team strikes out early the next morning to activate the remnant pillars and vault while the Resistance and Collective launch an all-out attack on the kett, not just on the base but also the outposts and labour camps across Voeld. To get the numbers they need for a strike this size, the Resistance base has been left wholly undefended, and only a minimal security team remains at Techiix and Hjara Station. In Evfra's words, they have no other option but to win.

Scott and Reyes are waiting in one of the shuttles on _Defiance_ , herself flying a holding pattern above the clouds between Techiix and the kett base until the ground forces reach the base's hangar. It's deceptively peaceful up here, the cameras showing nothing but swirling grey clouds below and clear blue skies above while Reyes listens in on the radio chatter, gunfire and explosions providing constant background noise.

 _"Defiance_ , you're up," one of the Collective captains informs them after several hours of waiting. "We're holding the western hangar bay for you, we'll send up a flare to confirm our position."

Derc immediately brings _Defiance_ beneath the clouds, pointing her towards the bright yellow light snaking upwards from the base.

"Shuttle one, you're clear to launch," Keema says over the comms as the hatch begins to open. "Good luck."

"And to you," Reyes replies. "Take care of my ship."

Once the shuttle detaches from _Defiance_ , she continues at speed towards the base while Reyes follows with the shuttle at a slower pace, waiting for her to clear a path to the hangar bay. The anti-aircraft guns are quick to lock onto _Defiance_ , but she takes the battering stoically courtesy of the new shield generators Reyes and Lynx had installed before they'd left Kadara. _Defiance_ takes out two of the anti-aircraft guns from the air, the Resistance takes out two from inside, and the way is clear for the shuttle to land in the bay.

On their way in, Reyes sees a squad of Resistance fighters fleeing from an advancing field of electricity that looks on the verge of engulfing the entire room. Reyes aims the shuttle's guns at the centre of the field—somewhere on the upper floors, out of his line of sight—and opens fire until the electric field shuts off. A kett ascendant falls to the floor.

"Thanks for the assist," one of the Resistance captains says, a hint of surprise in her voice.

"Always happy to help."

Up in the observation room, it's startlingly quiet. Scott and Reyes both have their guns out—Scott's traded in his Widow for a more suitable Sandstorm for this mission—but there's no one to greet them when the doors open, not even an automated security system. This far away from the fighting, the only thing they can hear is the low hum of machinery, and their footsteps sound painfully loud echoing off the walls.

"Guess they didn't expect anyone to make it this far," Scott whispers.

"I don't think anyone would have, without SAM's help," Reyes says, not bothering to lower his voice. SAM's analysis of the floor indicates they're the only two life signs around.

 ** _Correct,_** SAM confirms. **_The elevator controls were keyed to kett biology, and the Resistance has neither the technological resources nor skills to bypass the security system._**

"So if you can get past their security, you can shut down the base too, right?" Scott asks.

**_So it stands to reason. Please connect me to one of the consoles._ **

Once SAM is inside the system, the consoles open right up for them. Reyes can't read any of the buttons, but he pokes a few that look non-threatening anyway, and is rewarded with a data stream on one of the holographic screens. He can't read that either, but SAM can probably translate once he gets his neural networks into a few texts.

"SAM, send me a copy of everything that's stored on these databases," Reyes says.

"We're supposed to be sharing with the Resistance," Scott reminds him.

"And Evfra will get his copy too, but I never said I wouldn't peek before I sent it over."

Scott lets out a small amused huff, but he doesn't object further.

Satisfied that SAM will make sure he doesn't miss out on anything, Reyes moves over to the single window in the room. "Come over here, Scott. Look at this."

Sara must have activated the vault, because the relentless blizzard outside has finally died down, revealing a mountainous landscape dusted in white, bathed in the soft light that's gradually sneaking through the blanket of grey that stretches from horizon to horizon.

"It's beautiful." Scott drapes his arm around Reyes' waist and pulls him close.

"At least until we have to go back out in it," Reyes murmurs, resting his head on Scott's shoulder. Voeld will always be an ice planet, and no amount of terraforming can change that.

They hold each other as they stare out the window for a few minutes, enjoying their rare moment of peace, until SAM quietly informs them at the base has been successfully shut down, and that all files stored in the base computers have been downloaded and will be available back on _Defiance_ for Reyes' viewing.

"Do me a favour and get a start on the translation, would you?" Reyes asks as he reluctantly disentangles himself from Scott.

**_Should I also send the files to Commander de Tershaav?_ **

"Don't worry, I'll take care of that."

Scott gives Reyes another reproving look, but Reyes only checks that the thermal clip in his rifle is full before gesturing towards the elevator.

"There's still a fight to win down there, you know," Reyes says. "Just because the base has shut down doesn't mean the kett have."

-

The battle continues to rage into the afternoon, and it's evening by the time shuttles stop bringing in kett reinforcements from other outposts around Voeld. Across the region, although Resistance forces are reporting heavy losses and Reyes knows the Collective has lost a few of its own, the coordinated attack has resulted in a net win.

"Well done, everyone," Sara says to the Collective agents gathered in one corner of the kett base while Evfra addresses the gathered Resistance forces from the balcony above. "I know Evfra can be cranky and overly suspicious at the best of times, but I think your help with today's attack, and the smaller skirmishes from the last few days, will go a long way to earning some goodwill for the Collective. Rest up and await further orders. I'll make sure the Charlatan hears of the good work you did here."

They all disperse to their shuttles and head back to Techiix; Reyes has to discuss the next steps of Sara's plan with her and Evfra, but he doesn't think even Evfra will have the energy for a planning session tonight.

 _Defiance_ is already parked in her usual spot by the time Reyes flies over Techiix, but he doesn't bring the shuttle down yet. The clouds have parted even more, revealing the brilliant green and blue lights of the aurora that could previously only be seen from high above the clouds.

"Wow," Scott breathes as Reyes sets the shuttle down on the cliffs above Techiix. "Who knew that was there all along?"

"The angara on Voeld have likely never seen such a sight from the ground," Reyes says. "I wonder what they'll make of it."

"We're really doing this, aren't we? We're really making a difference."

"So drinkable water on Kadara doesn't mean making a difference, but a few lights on Voeld does?" Reyes teases. "Good to know where your priorities lie."

"You know what I mean," Scott says exasperatedly. "We're bringing good things back to Heleus, whether it's drinkable water, pretty lights, or making plants less murderous. It makes me proud to be a part of all this."

"Yeah. Me too." Reyes' time in Andromeda has been marked by trying to make a difference, some efforts smaller than others, but they truly are on the brink of something great this time, he knows it.

-

It's a mark of how much the attack took out of everyone that Reyes gets six consecutive hours of sleep that night. It's also a mark of how off-kilter his life has been thrown the past few weeks that he's not woken by a message or call, but by his own body, unused to the luxury of such a long period of uninterrupted rest.

Scott doesn't have the same problem, a complete dead weight on Reyes' right arm that he slowly extricates from under Scott before tucking the blankets close around his sleeping form. The heat is running on low in the crew quarters to prevent everyone from freezing to death in their sleep, but it's still cold enough that Reyes finds himself shivering violently in the few seconds it takes him to get changed.

"SAM, how are we doing with the sun situation out there?" Reyes asks on his way out of his quarters. "Any chance of getting out the solar panels and turning up the heat in here?"

**_The sun is starting to rise. I will see what I can do._ **

The crew, also used to running on little sleep by now, gradually emerge from their quarters to join Reyes at the dining table where he's eating breakfast and working through the email backlog that's built up while he was asleep.

The upcoming assault on the Nexus has everyone excited—save Keema, who's less enthused but nevertheless supportive—but though Reyes has a fairly good idea of how the attack will go down, between the reports from the latest strike teams to complete their missions, and the updates on manufacturing progress for new weapons, armour, and mods, he has more than enough to think about without adding the Nexus to the mix. At least, not until nine.

The meeting drags on for hours. Sara insists on going over every detail of the plan from the blueprints for shield pylons SAM has been sending to Ambassador Kesh, to the placement of each squadron in the fleet prior to initiating the attack. The size of their forces _is_ something Reyes is concerned about, but going over the numbers again and again isn't going to change them.

When the meeting finally ends, Reyes escapes out to one of the remote balconies in Techiix to clear his head for a minute before tackling the list of notifications that had been steadily accumulating for the last few hours. But even there, he can't catch a moment alone.

"Reyes."

The voice is vaguely familiar enough that Reyes raises his head instead of ignoring whoever it is.

"Vetra. What do you need?"

"Who says I need anything?"

"Everyone who comes looking for me nowadays needs something, whether it's information, time, or one of those new shield focusing modules I keep telling everyone we're still out of."

"Yeah, I noticed. Which is why I'm actually here to give you some advice." Vetra leans against the railing an arm's length away from Reyes.

"Advice?" He raises an eyebrow.

"Take this from someone who's been running the biggest smuggling racket out of the Nexus for the past eight years: you can't do it all by yourself."

"I'm aware. Why else do you think I'm here sitting through endless meetings instead of challenging the Archon to single combat for the rights to the cluster?"

Vetra ignores his attempt at levity. "I know Sara's lent you some of SAM's processing power to help get the Collective up and running again, but when she needs to commandeer him for pathfinder duties, you'll be left in the dark."

"I know." It's something Reyes has been trying to avoid thinking about. "I also know better than to trust most of these Collective recruits long enough to turn my back on them, even my old representatives. A person can change a lot in eight years. Why do you think I took most of my best agents with me when I disbanded the Collective? And of course, now I've planned myself into a corner because I'd rather have them on the ship than out there on Collective business."

"So start with one. Just enough to take the load off for a bit."

"Are you offering? Because telling me I can trust you is not the best way to instil trust."

"I know where to get a few crates of shield focusing modules."

"Sold." Vetra has not only a long-standing association with Reyes going for her, but also Sara's backing, which would have come with SAM's oversight. And if she's willing to take on some of the Collective's supply logistics for Reyes, that's already a considerable load off his plate. "The biggest smuggling racket out of the Nexus, huh?"

"Yup. And there's no one alive who can refute that claim, so don't even bother to go looking."

"I would never."

-

Two days after the kett base on Voeld falls, Reyes' news feeds blow up with reports of a fleet sighted in Govorkam, led by a kett cruiser. More than a thirty-hour flight away and with no strike teams in closer positions to go to Kadara's aid, all Reyes can do is wait for news from his agents on the ground.

It takes more than half the day, but the cruiser is taken out by the planetary defence cannon, and the rest of the fleet destroyed with the help of a squadron of shuttles that had been docked at the port to be retrofitted with guns. Reyes authorises the release of some of the stockpiled luxuries for a small celebration.

The day after that, the kett launch retaliatory strikes across Voeld, but without their command centre and Prefect, the attacks are less organised than they've been in the past, and easily repelled by the Resistance.

These victories have everyone in high spirits until Collective agents in the Pytheas System report that the dreadnought usually in orbit around Eos is on the move. Even SAM can't tell where it's going—he'd only been able to track _Defiance_ previously due to his link with Sara—so no one knows where it'll end up until it gets there.

"We need to move on the Nexus now," Sara says when Reyes breaks the news to her. "If that dreadnought appears in Zheng He, we're done for."

Reyes agrees and immediately mobilises the Collective fleet while Sara tells Dunn to do the same with the Initiative, and informs Evfra of the expedited timeline. He's convinced the dreadnought will come to Voeld to retake the foothold the kett have held here for decades, but grudgingly dispatches the three transport ships of troops he'd promised once Sara reminds him she'd upheld their end of the deal.

Anticipation hangs in the air as the crew of _Defiance_ prepares to leave Voeld for the Nexus, the place most of them had walked away from ten years ago.

"It's come a long way since then," Scott tells them. "The last of the construction finished on the first ward two years ago, and it's like a proper city, with schools, shops, hospitals, gardens. Even with the kett around, it's still a nice place."

"Imagine how much nicer it'll be with the kett gone," Reyes says.

"If it survives the battle," Lynx adds. "I know the Nexus folk have been building shield pylons, but if that dreadnought decides to turn its guns on the Nexus, no shield is going to be able to stand up to that."

"That's why we'll be focusing our fire on the dreadnought first. There's no telling if SAM's virus has spread to the dreadnought or how long it'll be able to keep the dreadnought disabled, so we've got to take any advantage we can, even it if means passing up the easier targets."

To have a plan is well and good, but when they're just a few hours out from Zheng He, SAM informs them of the news that's just hit Resistance channels: the dreadnought from Eos has arrived on the doorstep of Onaon. Having learned from their previous mistake of trusting one of their dreadnoughts to an Alliance escort, this one is accompanied by two kett cruisers.

It's too late for the bulk of the Collective and Initiative fleets to change course now, but Evfra recalls the ships he'd committed to the Nexus as well as all non-essential personnel from Voeld and Havarl. It doesn't change their plan of attack, but those three transport ships had been carrying over two hundred Resistance fighters in total, meant to supplant the small militia on the Nexus and protect the civilians from the kett. Now, Reyes isn't sure if they've set themselves up to win one battle only to lose another.

At least one good thing to come out of this is that the kett hadn't counted on them gunning for the Nexus, and the forces that greet them upon arrival are no more than the standard patrol fleet they'd accounted for.

Without the few extra days they'd need to carefully coordinate their arrival, the bulk of the fleets haven't arrived yet by the time _Defiance_ and the _Tempest_ breach the borders of Zheng He with the handful of ships that had accompanied them from Voeld. The other ships that had beat them there have been holding at the edge of the system.

"Go," Sara orders. "Don't give them time to call in reinforcements or think too hard about what we're up to."

 _Easy for you to say_ , Reyes thinks for an uncharitable moment; the _Tempest_ has to hang back, and most of the ships entering the fray are Collective, whom Reyes is responsible for keeping alive. But he knows, were he in Sara's place, he would give the same order.

Still, there's no sense in making a suicidal run for the Nexus when they'll still need as many ships as they can to take down the dreadnought later, so Reyes orders the Collective to lure the smaller ships away from the pack and wear down their numbers until it's time for the main event. He still loses a third of his ships and their crew, but it's worth it when the rest of the fleets arrive and SAM activates the virus that's been lying dormant on the kett and Alliance ships.

The virus hasn't spread to all of them, but enough ships are disabled that the Collective and Initiative are free to focus their firepower on the dreadnought. It's not quite the spectacle they'd been treated to in Govorkam with two ships of similar size squaring off against each other, but slowly, the dreadnought's armour begins to fail, and sections fall away from the body of the ship, exposing its interior.

"Don't let up now," Reyes orders as the smaller ships successfully reboot their systems and take advantage of the fleets' attention being trained on the dreadnought. "This thing can take out half the Nexus with one shot. This could be our last chance to destroy it before it does any real damage."

In his earpiece, he can hear Sara asking SAM to lock those ships out of their systems again.

**_I am sorry, Pathfinder. Since they have managed to eradicate the virus I installed, I no longer have remote access to their systems._ **

Reyes has another idea. "SAM, now that you can see inside the dreadnought, can you scan it and send everyone the location of its drive core?"

**_Scanning. Uploading the drive core's location to all targeting consoles._ **

"Captain Dunn, have some frigates stand by with missiles to fire into the drive core once we clear you a path," Reyes says on the open channel. "Everyone else, lock your guns onto the target the pathfinder has so kindly painted for us."

Kinetic and laser weapons won't do more than shut down the drive core, but the explosives contained in the missiles cause it to overload, sending lines of electric blue sparking along the length of the dreadnought as its systems and everything in it burns to a crisp.

"All units to return to their positions!" Reyes barks out as everyone stops to stare. It's a once-in-a-lifetime sight, sure, but the battle isn't over yet, and he's sure some enterprising vidmaker will be able to piece something together from the flight cameras. "Protect the Nexus!"

 ** _The kett are focusing fire on Ilsana Ward,_** SAM says. ** _The shield pylons are failing._**

He brings up the appropriate camera feed in time for Reyes to see one arm of the Nexus light up in brilliant orange.

"This is Pathfinder Ryder," Sara says. " _Tempest_ is going in to assist. Everyone else hold position."

"Tell me I'm not the only one who just heard that," Reyes says over _Defiance_ 's intercom.

"We heard it," Keema confirms.

"What does she think she's going to be able to do? The _Tempest_ will probably fall apart on the first hit it takes."

"I know, which is why we're going in as backup."

" _Defiance_ is a cargo ship retrofitted with guns and shield generators." Reyes transfers the work he's doing at the terminal to his omni-tool and hauls ass to the engine room. There's no arguing with Keema when she gets into captain mode. "Even a single fighter would provide better backup."

"Not on the ground."

"On the—" Of course that's what had Sara meant by 'going in'. Why would they need two hundred Resistance soldiers when one foolhardy pathfinder with a ship as durable as a sheet of paper and only half a dozen combat-ready crew would make do instead?

"Everyone to battle stations."

" _Defiance_ , what are you doing?" Sara's voice comes on over the intercom.

"Helping," Keema replies. "You're welcome."

"I thought I told everyone else to hold their positions."

"You did."

There're a few seconds of silence, then Sara says drily, "The ship is aptly named, I see."

"Yes."

"I don't suppose I'll be able to convince you to turn around."

"No."

"Then I guess we'll see you on the ground."

Keema relays commands over the intercom to keep everyone in the loop, and for once, Reyes is glad he can't see what's going on outside. He can certainly feel it though, in the way _Defiance_ jerks and shudders as Derc performs evasive manoeuvres and Crux lays down covering fire for the _Tempest_. The whole ship shakes when shots graze _Defiance_ 's shields—levels falling rapidly—and Reyes diverts power from all non-essential systems to the shield generators. The engine room plunges into darkness for a second before the emergency lighting kicks in.

"What happened?" Keema asks.

"I had to divert auxiliary power to the shields before we lost them," Reyes tells her. "We need to land soon." That'll open up a whole other host of problems, but at least 'dying in the vacuum of space' won't be one of them.

"On it," Derc says. "Be prepared for a hard landing."

Reyes watches the numbers on the proximity sensor tick down as they get closer to the Nexus, and transfers all shields to _Defiance_ 's keel just before Derc sets her down heavily. This prevents the ship from falling apart on impact, but doesn't do much to prevent inertia from tossing around anyone not strapped in.

"Everyone, check in," Keema orders once they've come to a complete stop.

Reyes claws his way up from the floor with a groan and raises a hand to his comm; the shields have drained all remaining power from _Defiance_ , and the intercom won't work even if he can reach it.

Everyone makes their presence known and confirms they're all more or less in one piece.

"Derc, stay with the ship. Everyone else, gear up."

They rendezvous in the cargo bay, everyone armed to the teeth and looking a little beaten up from the rough landing but raring to go. Even Nakamoto's there, medkit in hand, pistol strapped to his thigh.

"There's atmo out there, right?" Reyes asks as he grabs a pack of cryo ammo from the arms locker.

"First thing we checked," Crux says.

"Listen up." Keema comes down the stairs, rifle in hand. "We've landed quite a bit away from the _Tempest_ , but that doesn't matter. Our goal is still to kill as many kett as possible. Let's get to it."

Outside, it's clear that a battle had passed through not long ago: medics tend to the wounded, carting away those who can be moved on stretchers, civilians race to put out the fires ripping through the residential blocks, and further ahead, the militia valiantly drives back the kett.

Scott's got his trusty Widow in his hands, and breaks from the group at the first opportunity to get up somewhere high while Nakamoto lends the medics a hand and the rest of them join up with the militia. They get a few curious glances, but no one wants to question where their new allies have come from in the middle of a firefight.

It feels good to be back in the middle of the action after weeks spent behind a terminal screen with only brief forays into the field on board _Defiance_ or a shuttle. Reyes wouldn't have thought he'd miss it, but with adrenaline coursing through his veins, standing shoulder to shoulder with his crew, and the sharp crack of Scott's Widow picking off kett from afar, Reyes can't imagine himself being anywhere else at that moment.

Once the kett fall back to regroup, they face a more uncertain enemy: the Alliance. The civilians that make up the militia have lived alongside the Alliance soldiers for years, and neither wants to be the first to open fire on an old friend.

Just as Reyes thinks they're going to have to call Sara to their location to mediate, a murmur ripples through the gathered crowd. Reyes hears the unhappy noise Scott makes in his ear before he sees Alec Ryder come down the paved walkway and stop in the middle, paying no heed to the tens of guns pointed at him.

"Why do you still fight?" He directly addresses the Alliance soldiers, but doesn't turn his back on either side. "Why do you continue to carry out the orders of absent masters? Their dreadnoughts are no more, and we drive more of their numbers out of their strongholds and outposts by the day.

"For years the kett have pitted our people against each other, but no longer. Today, we take control of our fate once more. Stand down your weapons. Turn them on the ones who are truly deserving of your ire."

They're not yet so far removed from the Milky Way that Ryder's N7 armour and what it stands for means nothing to them. Whether it's because of that or because his words have managed to move them, the Alliance stands down.

Across the Nexus, more Alliance forces change sides as news of the kett fleet's defeat begins to trickle down. And across the Nexus, sightings of the pathfinder stops people in their tracks like it had on Kadara, like no one had allowed themselves to believe the rumours until they'd seen her in the flesh.

At fourteen fifty-eight local time, the space around the Nexus has fallen silent, and the majority of the fighting on the station itself has ceased.

"This is Pathfinder Ryder to the Initiative and Collective fleets," Sara says on the open channel, only slightly out of breath. "Command ships are to dock with the Nexus for debriefing. All other ships to hold position until further notice. Well done, everyone. We've taken back our home."

As cheers erupt over the comms and across the Nexus, Reyes catches Keema's eye.

"Is this everything you'd hoped for?" she asks.

All he'd dared to hope for had been a little corner of the cluster where the kett couldn't reach them. Thank the stars for those with bigger dreams.

"No," he replies. "It's better."


	16. Forward Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A team of pathfinders is assembled to begin the search for Meridian.

Sara's reserved _Defiance_ a landing pad at the docks right next to the _Tempest_ 's. It's just a short walk from the Commons, which has come a long way from the darkened halls and cordoned-off walkways that Reyes remembers. There's a bar, a market, an immigration checkpoint, and even the cultural centre has been opened. Some of the angara who'd assisted in the fight—Kadarans who don't care enough about Aya to join the Resistance in Onaon—have congregated there, though others have already learned as much as they care to know about the Milky Way species over the last ten years.

Reyes will have to coordinate the Collective's next moves in a short while after everyone's had the chance to celebrate, but right now, he's standing in the middle of the Commons with Scott, watching a vid of the dreadnought imploding being played on a loop on the screen above the entrance to the tram station.

"Want to come over to my house?" Scott asks.

"Is it far from here?"

"Few minutes by tram."

Reyes looks around them at the casks of drinks being cracked open and distributed freely in the middle of the square, the music being blasted from every portable speaker and omni-tool as people shout and dance on the balconies, the shuttles doing victory laps up and down the flight corridor leaving trails of coloured smoke behind them.

"Sure." If no one else is working, why should he?

The Ryder house is out in the torus, still a part of the central hub of the Nexus but far away enough from any essential operations that it hadn't been targeted by the kett. There's still some damage from falling debris and stray shots from space that have to be cleaned up, but no one seems to be worried about that right now, taking to the streets and gardens to revel in their victory.

Scott goes to place his hand on the biometric scanner by the door, but before he can do so, the door slides open.

"Scott!" Sara jumps on her brother and envelops him in a bone-crushing hug.

"Sara?" Scott chokes out. "I thought you were going to meet with the leadership."

"Yeah, I just couldn't bring myself to go in there alone. So I thought I'd gather some pathfinders first and we could go up there together and present a united front, then the leadership would just have to do whatever we told them to."

"Clever," Reyes says. "Are you hiding the pathfinders in your house?"

"Not yet, I still have to decide who they'll be."

"Let us in, will you?" Scott takes a staggered step forward, and pretending Sara is obscuring his field of view more than she actually is, walks her into a wall.

Sara lets out a yell of protest and she and Scott tussle for a bit while Reyes steps inside after them and takes a look around the living room.

It's a fairly standard apartment layout similar to the place Reyes had lived in during his short stay on the Nexus, just with a bigger couch and television and more shelves and cupboards along the walls filled with books, models, pictures, and awards. The largest picture is a print on the wall above the television, one of the artistic renders of Habitat 7 that had been a major part of the Initiative's recruitment material. The other pictures are in digital frames and rotate through various images of the Ryder family, some of which Reyes had seen before on Sara's omni-tool.

"You." Alec Ryder stops in the doorway between the living room and the hallway that leads to the bedrooms.

"Reyes." Their last face-to-face encounter hadn't exactly been on friendly terms, and though Reyes has no doubt Ryder knows every bit of publicly available information about _Defiance_ 's crew members and then some, it entertains him to play dumb.

"What are you doing here?"

"Scott invited me over."

Scott had stopped wrestling on the floor with Sara at the sound of his father's voice and is at Reyes' side in an instant.

"You're at home," Scott says, overly dramatically. "Is the world ending?"

Ryder's jaw clenches like he wants to return the sarcasm in kind, but instead he says in a level voice, "I'm helping Sara narrow down the list of pathfinder candidates."

"Well, good luck with that. We're going to find somewhere else to be." Scott wraps a hand around Reyes' arm and starts backing up towards the front door.

"Scott, wait," Sara says. "I'd really like to know your thoughts on some of these people. You can stay too, Reyes."

"I couldn't possibly know any of your candidates," Reyes says. "And I have work of my own to do." He disentangles himself from Scott. "We'll catch up later."

Scott shoots him a wounded look as he legs it out of the apartment, but it's for the best; Sara seems keen on having this family moment, and without Reyes' presence, Scott won't feel the need to put up a front for anyone else but himself.

Reyes heads back to _Defiance_ to find his work somehow piling up again even though everyone seems otherwise occupied; Sara's been busy with more than just finding pathfinder candidates, and has already dispatched salvage crews to round up the debris around the Nexus. Most of Reyes' emails are complaints about there not being much left to salvage from the dreadnought due to almost everything of value being fried when the drive core had overloaded.

He ignores those emails and asks SAM to check in on the Resistance and ask Evfra if the Collective should send reinforcements; he might just be desperate enough to accept the help.

**_Evfra thanks you for the offer, but says the Resistance has been holding their own and he believes the Collective's assistance will not be required,_** SAM relays back.

"Holding their own against a dreadnought? Where have the angarans been hiding their fleet all this time?"

**_Upon our arrival in Zheng He, Sara requested that Alec boost power to SAM Node on the Nexus in the hopes that I might be able to activate the virus on any of the kett ships in Onaon. Not only did it work, but the virus was also present on the dreadnought, and the angara were able to destroy it with their ground-based defences._ **

"Huh, how about that? So what's the score now, three-one our way?" One of the Initiative cruisers had been lost with all hands while _Defiance_ and the _Tempest_ had been down on the Nexus; a cruiser doesn't quite measure up to a dreadnought, but it's the heaviest class of ship the Initiative has at its disposal.

**_An angaran cruiser was among the ships badly damaged in the fight. What information I have been able to glean about its status suggests it can be repaired, but to have it restored to fighting condition could take many months._ **

"Let's call it three-two, then. I'm still feeling optimistic."

None of the other messages in Reyes' inbox warrant immediate replies, so he decides to make the most of the downtime by seeing what the Nexus has to offer ten years on.

Not much on the torus seems to be different—stores, apartments, and the minimal amount of greenery and decoration to not make the place feel institutional—so Reyes heads down to the station to catch a tram back out to Ilsana Ward, curious to see what it looks like when it's not being bombed from orbit.

It's…suburban. Like something out of an old Earth vid. The tram station is on a high point so he can see down the length of the ward, across the irregularly distributed rows of houses with footpaths and gardens winding in between. A few high-rise buildings here and there, but nothing to block the view of the horizon that's gradually turning orange with the simulated sunset. Far down the other end of the ward, Reyes sees large plots of greenery he thinks might be a farm.

He feels like he's stepped off the Nexus and onto a planet, because there's no way that space on a station would be so frivolously used for things like single-household dwellings and open-air farms. But with so many of the original Initiative's numbers lost to the Scourge or the kett, maybe the Nexus _can_ afford to make believe its own little colony in space.

He gets on a separate tram that runs the length of the ward, riding it all the way out to the far end. As he watches the landscape pass by outside, idyllic even when marred with explosion craters, he feels like he's wandering through a dream, like he's gone out to the basin past Spirits' Ledge where it's eerily silent with not a single living soul in sight. But unlike on Kadara, from the tram he can see ordinary people going about their lives down below, not scavengers lying in wait to see who'd fallen for the bait this time; back when he'd been running Collective operations on Kadara, he'd periodically send his agents in to spring the trap to keep the scavengers from getting too complacent.

The tram terminates in the middle of the farmland, and Reyes stands on the platform for a few minutes looking through the glass walls at the robotic arms that slowly sweep over the fields, spraying a fine mist of water over the growing crops. He tears his eyes away when his omni-tool chimes with a new message.

_Where are you?_ Scott's asked.

Reyes sends him a picture of the landscape.

_Be there in 15_ , Scott says.

Riveting as the sight of crops being watered is, Reyes doesn't want to stand around the tram station for fifteen minutes, so he goes downstairs where there's a quaint little boardwalk raised over a small creek that's been carefully planted to hide the fact that it's runoff from the farms. The illusion is only somewhat broken by the sign that proclaims, WASTEWATER DO NOT DRINK.

With this area being so sparsely populated, the kett had left it alone, and Reyes can almost pretend a massive battle to decide the fate of the Nexus hadn't just taken place not far away. In fact, looking at the fertile cropland not to be found anywhere else, if this is what a deal with the kett buys, he can see why some people had been reluctant to put up resistance.

For those fortunate enough to remain on the Nexus and not be assigned to one of the remote outposts, life would have been easier. Good, even—no fighting wildlife and scavengers for scraps of food or a safe place to sleep, no looking over their shoulders for spies and informants around every corner. But even through all that, Reyes wouldn't trade his years in exile for a place on the Nexus. This is where he's meant to stand, looking in from the outside.

"Hey." Scott comes up from behind and bumps Reyes' elbow with his own.

He's slow to react, still caught in a daydream of days gone by. "Scott. Hi."

"Everything alright?"

Reyes shakes himself out of his reverie. "Everything's fine. Just caught up in some thoughts. Musings. What-could-have-beens."

"Do you want to go back to the ship?"

"No, I made you come all the way out here, the least I can do is buy you dinner. Know of anywhere good?"

"There are some restaurants a few stops back." Scott links arms with Reyes and steers him back towards the tram station. "Bars, too. The kind that's buried down in the ward framework with loud music and flashing lights where they let you lie on the counter and drink shots off each other's bodies."

Reyes returns Scott's grin. "You really know how to show a man a good time."

-

Sara announces the new pathfinders with the evening news the next day—Avitus Rix, a turian; Vederia Damali, an asari; Zevin Gaerix, a salarian; Senna'Nir vas Keelah Si'yah, a quarian; and Anax Therion, a drell. Reyes, still nursing the most epic hangover he's had in recent memory, is personally introduced to them—as the Charlatan, with his voice and image obscured—at the command meeting she calls the morning after, noticeably absent of any of the Nexus command staff. Evfra has been patched in from Onaon though, reporting that Aya is safe and sound, and confirming that the last kett dreadnought has been destroyed.

Formalities out of the way, Sara brings up an indecipherable image on the holoprojector of hundreds of dots joined by lines, linking back to one large spot brighter than the rest. "When SAM and I first activated the vault on Eos, it showed us a map like this one, which we suspected was a network of all the vaults across Heleus. Our suspicions were confirmed after we activated the vault on Havarl and another spot lit up."

"What's the big bright spot up there?" Vederia asks.

"We believe that's a control centre for all the vaults. If we can find where it is, we might be able to activate all the vaults in the cluster at once. There could be more golden worlds out there than we'd been able to see from the Milky Way. A new homeworld for each species."

"I hope you're not proposing we blindly send out scout ships looking for this control centre," Evfra says.

"No. When I was…the Archon's guest, he mentioned something called Meridian that he'd been trying to figure out how to use. Given that he's obsessed with the remnant, I'm willing to bet that this Meridian is the same thing we're looking for. The Archon might not be able to use it, but if it's anything like the vaults we've already encountered, SAM will."

"So all we need to do is get the location from the Archon," Reyes says. 

"He has a map. It's stored on some remnant relic that I'm pretty sure he keeps in his quarters."

"So we find the Archon's ship, steal the relic, use it to find Meridian, activate Meridian, and all our problems are solved?" Anax asks.

"At the very least," Sara says, "we won't ever have to rely on the kett again. Even if more of them come, we'll be ready."

Reyes puts out a simple message through Collective channels: _Where is the Archon's ship?_ In under half an hour, he receives three replies.

"The Archon is hiding out in Inalaara." Reyes interrupts Sara's plans for dividing up the cluster into sectors for each of them to search. Everyone turns to look at him. "I've had the Collective keeping tabs on the Archon and his higher-up cronies ever since you baited him into attacking Kadara."

Sara recovers quickly. "Straight to the infiltration phase it is, then. Six pathfinders, six ships, and the Resistance and the Collective can also send a ship each if they'd like. Let's get these ships together, then we'll reconvene to come up with a plan of attack."

-

It takes just four days to scramble five more ships worthy of bearing a pathfinder on board, but of the eight ships that make up their squadron, only three have stealth drives. One of them is the Resistance ship, _Esoria_ , that Evfra offers up for the mission, along with, reportedly, one of his best pilots and infiltration teams. Reyes isn't quite sure whether he's showing off or trying to make up for having to pull his forces from the Nexus.

" _Rilius_ , _Nazaran_ , _Karom_ , _Irios_ , and _Defiance_ will approach the Archon's ship from different directions, and _Esoria_ , _Pelegeuse_ , and _Tempest_ will slot themselves in wherever they feel is best. The five of you will appear to launch an attack on the ship and keep the Archon from noticing there are actually eight of us until the three infiltration teams are on board. Pilots of the infiltration ships: if the kett discover you, join the others in running interference, otherwise disengage and stay close for evacuation. Any questions?" Sara looks up from the simulation SAM is displaying on the holoprojector in Pathfinder HQ.

"Since we're pretending to attack the ship," Avitus says, "what should we do if we actually get close enough to board?"

"Follow through."

"Interior security will tighten."

"It will anyway if there's an obvious opening and you don't take it, and I'd rather have you inside for backup."

"Noted."

Reyes gets to leave the meeting then since _Defiance_ will only be running interference and he doesn't need the specifics of what the infiltration team will be doing. He goes through the usual motions of checking reports from his agents—the krogan have been raining hell down on the remaining kett on Elaaden, which is looking to quickly become the next free planet—rearranging their assignments—it'll take at least sixty-three hours to reach Inalaara, and if the Archon goes anywhere in the meantime, he wants to hear about it—and making sure Kadara Port is still under Collective control. It makes him uneasy to be conducting business so far from their home base, but their recent victories and the high concentration of colonists from the _Keelah Si'yah_ still on Kadara have kept the situation there relatively stable.

For the trip to Inalaara, Nakamoto remains on board as one of the only two medics they've got on the mission—the other being Doctor T'Perro on the _Tempest—_ and Scott also stays with _Defiance_ after reluctantly bowing out from Sara's infiltration team to keep their numbers small. They stop over in Nol near Voeld, where they resupply, and _Esoria_ joins them for the last leg of the journey.

When the interference team arrives at the coordinates Reyes' agents had provided, no fewer than a dozen kett fighters have already been deployed. The five ships are set upon immediately, with none of the fighters remaining to guard the flagship, which hopefully means their ruse is working.

**_Team One is in position_** , SAM tells them, meaning the _Tempest_ has successfully docked and unloaded its ground crew. They're quickly followed by Teams Two and Three, then the three ships detach themselves and remain on standby.

-

The rest of the plan unfolds as expected, with the interference team putting up as good of a fight as they can while taking minimal damage to ensure the pathfinders and ships remain intact for the real fight to come. They hear nothing from the infiltration team for a good hour until SAM announces with as much satisfaction as an AI can, **_Coordinates secured._**

Reyes heaves a sigh of relief. "Thank the stars, we can finally get out of here." The fighters haven't proved to be anything out of the ordinary, but the guns in the batteries on each side of the flagship have enough power to slice _Defiance_ clean in half with one shot, and much of their time has been spent strapped into harnesses while Derc throws _Defiance_ around like a rubber ball in a box, trying to avoid taking a direct hit.

Reyes winces with every creak and groan of _Defiance_ 's joints, and with every shriek and scratch of the engines throttling up and down and being turned side to side faster than they ever have before. Gravity's been turned off for easier movement through the ship, but Reyes had tried to go down to the starboard battery earlier to diagnose a slightly delayed swivel response, and all he'd succeeded in doing was being tossed about from wall to wall and thrown head over heels until he'd been so dizzy he couldn't tell which end of the ship was which, something in all of his years of spacefaring he's never experienced before.

SAM reports Team Two is back on the _Pelegeuse_ and leaving the system, then Team Three on _Esoria_ , but he remains oddly silent on Team One in the minutes that follow.

"Where's Sara?" Reyes hears Scott yelling from the cargo bay so that SAM can hear him in the control centre.

**_Team One is experiencing difficulty withdrawing. Please stand by._ **

"Anything we can do to help?" Reyes asks.

**_Please stand by._ **

SAM goes quiet after that, and Keema orders _Defiance_ in closer as if one ship half the size of a frigate can make a difference in whatever's happening on board. Through the interface in the control centre, Reyes can see that the other ships on the interference team have remained in position until the last of the infiltration team are out of range, as per the plan.

"What if we concentrate our fire on one part of the ship, try to depressurise the hull?" Reyes suggests to Keema.

"Not unless we know where Sara's team is so we can avoid hitting them."

Reyes is about to try SAM again to see if he'll divulge the information, but then SAM announces, **_Tempest, Team One is requesting extraction from the topside of the ship._**

"Roger that," Kallo replies. "We'll be in position in five minutes."

"Interference team, _Defiance_ will shortly be targeting the fore of the ship and leaving the Archon with the parting gift of a depressurised hull," Keema says over their shared comm channel. "You're welcome to join us."

None of the pathfinder ships are particularly large either so they won't be destroying a large portion of the flagship any time soon, but there is a certain satisfaction to at least inconveniencing the Archon as a final slap in the face after absconding with his closely-guarded secret of Meridian's location. One of them had managed to take out the flagship's forward gun, so they're free to open fire on the bow until the fighters discover them there and send them scattering.

Once the _Tempest_ has collected its crew and left the system, Crux fires _Defiance_ 's last two missiles through the broken windows of the flagship before Derc engages the FTL drive and speeds them away from the reinforcements hot on their tail.

-

The mood on board can be described almost as giddy even with the amount of cleanup they have to do, but three hours into the flight back to Nol, Reyes finds Scott sitting in the control room in front of SAM's terminal looking despondent.

"What's wrong?" Reyes asks, a teasing comment about Scott trying to avoid cleaning dying on his lips as he takes in Scott's expression.

"Sara had a run-in with the Archon and now she won't talk to me."

"Where is she now?"

"She's locked herself in her quarters. SAM says she's not doing anything, but…"

"You're still worried, I know." Reyes reaches out and gives Scott's shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "Why don't you stay here and keep talking to her; I'm sure it helps even if she isn't saying anything back. I'll work things out with Keema and the _Tempest_ to land on Voeld, and you can go see her then."

_Defiance_ and the _Tempest_ touch down at Taerve Uni, the new Initiative outpost being constructed to the west of the kett base. It's still little more than a cluster of prefabs at this point, but the buildings are lit up with an orange glow that invites them in out of the bitterly cold winds that still beset Voeld.

Scott heads over to the _Tempest_ where no one's seen Sara emerge from her room since leaving Inalaara, and an hour later, comms Reyes and asks him to come over.

Sara's sitting on one of the couches in her room, curled up in the corner and cocooned in a blanket, holding a cup of something hot and steaming between her hands. She gives Reyes a weak smile as he comes in and tentatively sits on the couch opposite her while Scott fixes a plate of snacks in the galley.

"Feeling better?" Reyes asks.

"I suppose so. I'd feel much better if I'd actually managed to show the Archon what for, but I just…froze up. He was right there, and I couldn't do anything."

"That happens," Reyes says, even though he still doesn't know what happened, exactly.

"I also literally couldn't do anything because he had us trapped in a force field, but he was _right there_."

"Then it's definitely not your fault. I'm sure Scott's already told you this."

"I know, I know. I just need some time. It's been months and I still—we don't have time for this."

"We have as much time as you need," Scott says, coming into the room. "The Archon knows we're coming for Meridian now, but it doesn't change the fact that he still doesn't know how to use it."

"About that…" Sara's hand emerges from the blankets to snatch a cookie off the plate Scott's holding. She nibbles thoughtfully on the edges while Scott and Reyes wait for her to finish saying what she'd started. "I'm pretty sure the rumours about the Archon being able to read minds is true."

"That's impossible," Scott says. "No one can do that."

"You've never 'embraced eternity' with an asari, I take it?" Reyes asks.

"I—no!" Scott sputters, going red. "They're…they're not my type."

"Have you?" Sara peers up at Reyes.

"No, I find I'm not the sharing sort."

"Besides, it's not the same," Scott says. "Otherwise you'd be able to read the Archon's mind too. Or did you?"

Sara shakes her head and disappears back into the blankets. "Being back there, it made me remember some things I think I was trying not to remember before. Like how the kett scientists wanted to cut me open to see if they could figure out how I made the remtech work, but before that, the Archon used to come and…talk to me. Alone, without using any kind of device or machine, and I'd feel him in my head. Like he was rummaging around trying to find something. Back then, there was nothing to find, but now…"

"You think he did it again?" Reyes asks.

"We're trapped in a force field, he puts his hand near my head, I get the worst headache of my life, and thoughts of places I've been and things I've done start flashing through my mind. What else could it be?"

Impossible or not, it's a very reasonable conclusion that Sara's come to—Ryder had certainly entertained the idea when he'd had SAM wipe Sara's memories before—and it won't hurt to be prepared in the event that she has inadvertently told the Archon all their plans. Reyes can't think of much he wouldn't already know about or suspect, except maybe SAM's existence and the identity of the Charlatan. Reyes doubts the Archon would care much for the latter—more notable to him would be the strength and scope of the Collective's network, which Sara doesn't know—but SAM is the reason Sara and the other pathfinders are able to use remnant technology, and he'd be something the Archon would be very interested in.

"The bad news is the Archon might now know about SAM if he didn't already, but the good news is that he doesn't have enough forces left to attack the Nexus and protect Meridian at the same time. Not through a frontal assault, at least. I'll have the Collective keep an eye on the Nexus in case the Archon stil has spies there, and we'll continue on to Meridian as planned," Reyes says.

"You're sure there's nothing else?" Sara asks. "Security codes? Trade routes?"

"Those are easily changed. I'll put out the word, but I don't think there's much for us to worry about. The Archon hedged most of his bets on the three dreadnoughts being enough to intimidate people into submission, but now that we've taken them out of the equation, it's anyone's game. And we've a lot of angry people on our side seeking retribution for what the kett have done to their homes and loved ones. If I was a betting man—and I am—I'd put money on us."

Sara heaves a sigh. "Okay. Thanks, Reyes. I'm just going to take a moment to pull myself together then we can head back to the Nexus."

-

Meridian is in the Civki system, nestled in some of the densest clusters of the Scourge Reyes has ever seen.

"Not exactly a welcoming sight," he remarks as he takes in the images from a long-range scan that Sara's put up on the holoprojector.

"It's teeming with kett, too," Gaerix says. "Or at least, that's what the satellite we launched told us before it was destroyed."

"So it's doubly unwelcoming."

"But nothing we haven't dealt with before. We press on to Meridian." Even through the blue haze of the vidcall, Sara looks much better, standing tall alongside the other pathfinders gathered around the vidcon unit.

"It'll take about a week to muster our forces," Avitus says. "We'll need to overestimate since we can't get a good read on how many kett are in the system, and we'll have to be careful about where we pull them from in case the Archon sends one of his lieutenants to attack while we're away."

"Actually, I was thinking this just needs three of us," Sara says. " _Tempest_ , _Pelegeuse_ , and _Esoria_ , just like we did with the Archon's ship. Except this time, the distraction is the rest of you pretending to muster forces on Elaaden in preparation for a frontal assault. Overlord Morda at New Tuchanka has agreed to help us keep up the illusion. Make sure everyone in the cluster knows what you're doing, and while the Archon has his eye on you, the three of us will slip into Meridian. By the time you've rounded up enough ships, you'll be just in time to be the reinforcements."

"And if the Archon has his eye on Meridian instead?" Reyes asks.

"Then I believe he's owed a much-needed ass kicking, and I'd be happy to hand it to him."

"A worthy goal. Just try to save a little for the rest of us."


	17. Meridian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Heleus pools its resources at Meridian. Things don't go so well for _Defiance_ and her crew.

"What do you mean it's not Meridian?"

"I mean it's not Meridian; what more do you want me to say? Look!" Sara waves her arm around, and the camera on her omni-tool shows Reyes some vaguely remnant-looking architecture. It's all too small and blurry for him to make out any details.

"I have no idea what I'm looking at."

"It's not that important." Sara turns the camera back onto herself. "Well, it is important, but the point is, it's not Meridian, so don't come in guns blazing. In fact, don't come at all. We'll come to you." The transmission ends.

Reyes and the four pathfinders left behind have been busy rounding up whatever forces can be spared to join them for an attack on Meridian, but now, it looks like their efforts have been wasted. By Reyes' reckoning, Meridian isn't necessary for their continued survival in Heleus, but it sure would be nice, and they _had_ banked considerable hopes on finding it. A double-edged sword, hope.

The _Tempest_ touches down at the Initiative outpost outside New Tuchanka fifteen hours later, two hours ahead of _Esoria_ and _Pelegeuse_. Sara doesn't wait for them before calling for a meeting on board the _Tempest_.

"We get there, the place is swarming with kett, practically buried in the Scourge, and we fight through all that only to find out the place isn't Meridian, but some central command hub." Sara paces around the vidcon unit, gesturing emphatically as she speaks. Her image on Reyes' screen fizzes in and out of existence between the pathfinders; those units really weren't made to support multiple users who didn't remain stationary. "All that only to be told, 'Meridian Engine cannot be found'. Whatever the _fuck_ that means."

Sara stops pacing and tilts her head slightly. "I know, SAM," she says after a brief silence, and resumes pacing. "I'll get SAM to send all of you a video of what we saw there, but the basic gist is, the people who created the"—an odd pause that Reyes isn't sure can be attributed to a lagging connection—"place, the jardaan, sent Meridian away to protect it from the Scourge. So it's still out there somewhere, we just have to find it before the Archon does, and my crew already has some ideas, but we're all exhausted so we'll talk about it more tomorrow. Everyone, please leave now."

Sara ends the vidcall only to call up Reyes a minute later on his personal number. "Hey, is Keema with you?"

"She's around. Did you need her for something?"

"Yeah, we gotta talk. Angara stuff. I'll leave it up to her whether she wants to tell the rest of you before the news goes out or not."

Naturally, Reyes is dying to know, but he points Sara towards the last place he'd seen Keema—one of the shuttle pads overlooking the sinkhole—and doesn't even follow to eavesdrop on their conversation.

Whatever 'angara stuff' Sara wanted to talk about, Keema doesn't deign to share before the meeting Sara calls in the outpost's research lab late the next evening. Reyes answers the call in bed with Scott tucked under his arm; the perks of joining in remotely.

"SAM and Suvi have figured out a way to track down Meridian," Sara tells them. "What they need from us is for every ship with a SAM to get out there and scan as many Scourge clusters as possible so they can map the path Meridian took through the Scourge using…something something ocean currents; I don't know, my field of study was biotics. And please don't explain it again, SAM, I'm too tired for this."

"And what role do you require the Resistance to play in this?" Evfra asks.

"Keep the Archon distracted. We don't know if he's figured out that Meridian is somewhere else yet, but I'd prefer he didn't catch on too early. And be ready when we call. Given the amount of ships we saw at the command centre, if the Archon points them all towards Meridian, we're going to need everyone."

"We'll be ready, Pathfinder," Evfra says before he disconnects.

Sara calls the meeting to a close soon after that, but Reyes doesn't turn his omni-tool off, distracted by the odd tone he'd heard in Evfra's voice. Keema's been acting weird too, spending most of her time in her quarters and not even coming out to join them for meals. By virtue of having his hands in every part of the ship, Reyes has noticed there's been a spike in the traffic on _Defiance_ 's satellite uplink in the last day, a large proportion of which is voice calls.

It's not Nakamoto, who's in the medbay seemingly writing a book with how focused he looks typing away at his terminal every time Reyes passes by; it's not Crux and Lynx, who spend most of their time in the galley lounge watching vids on the holoprojector; it's not Derc, who plays three different radio stations at once on the bridge and manages to listen to all of them while reading flight manuals for ships he'll never get his hands on; and it's definitely not Scott, who's been stuck to Reyes' side since leaving the Nexus.

"Do you know what's going on between Sara and the angara?" he asks Scott. "Keema's been making calls all day after talking to Sara yesterday."

"Yeah, Sara told me. But I think she's right to keep it within the angara for now, it's something that only really affects them, after all."

"Affects? As in, currently affecting?"

Scott groans. "I've said too much already. Stop fishing, I won't be saying anymore." He tugs Reyes down for a long kiss.

"Alright," Reyes says as Scott pushes up the hem of his shirt, "but this strategy of yours is only going work this one time, so you'd better make it count."

-

_Defiance_ is put on scanning duty for the three systems of Skeldah, Kindrax, and Faross. It's not as tedious as Reyes had expected, mostly because SAM does most of the work, allowing Reyes to stay in his quarters with Scott, occasionally coming out for food or to attend to a Collective matter in the operations control centre that can't be handled from his omni-tool.

Keema remains tight-lipped about the whole angaran business. Reyes has been keeping his eyes and ears open on all channels, but nothing's leaked yet. Whatever it is, it must be big—so big that no one's dared to speak about it where they might be overheard—but if Keema doesn't want to talk, Reyes isn't going to push. He knows a little about wanting to keep secrets hidden himself.

Halfway through the second week of their assignment, _Defiance_ is pursued through Kindrax by a squadron of kett fighters.

"I thought the others were supposed to be keeping them busy," Lynx says as she reluctantly pauses the vid and puts her boots back on. Being pursued by kett is old hat for them now, and it doesn't incite the same levels of panic it used to.

"The kett could have been keeping an eye on the system if they've realised Sara used to use Mendradym as a meeting spot," Keema says. "Whatever it is, let's do our part to make sure there are a few less kett in the cluster."

They handily defeat the squadron—in no small part thanks to SAM diverting his processing power allotted to them from scanning to targeting—salvage what parts they can because old habits die hard, then pick up where they'd left off with their methodical scan of the system.

Aside from that little bit of excitement, they're coming up on their third week of a veritable vacation when Sara recalls everyone to the Nexus.

"We've got it," she tells them. "We know where Meridian is. I'm going to give you all different routes to get there in case the Archon is watching us, but before we leave, we'll need more ships; we wanted to keep our numbers manageable before, but secrecy won't matter once we get there. We need ships with weapons and shields, capable of holding the line while we take Meridian. It's all very well and good to get boots on the ground, but if the kett can come up on us from behind, they can take Meridian out from right under us. We can't let that happen."

"The Resistance possesses few large ships," says Evfra, "but with all the kett dreadnoughts neutralised, with the governor's blessing I will recall all but one from Aya to aid in your endeavour."

"We can't leave the Nexus and the other planets unprotected either," Avitus says. "That leaves us with a little over half the Initiative fleet to work with, at best."

"And private ships?" Sara asks. "How many of those would you estimate are floating around?"

"Not many. The kett placed extremely stringent restrictions around the production of ships and weaponry."

"Such restrictions did not apply on Kadara," Reyes reminds Avitus.

All eyes turn to him.

"How many ships do you think you can get?" Sara asks.

Even with the cluster waging an all-out war against the kett, there are still hundreds, if not thousands, of independent scavenger and outlaw gangs out there, picking up salvage from the battlefields with their own ships and battle-ready crew. They might not be willing to join the fight for the sake of a common enemy, but Reyes knows the one thing they value above all else.

"How many credits are you willing to spend?"

-

Reyes and Sara decide it'll be better if he raises the call for mercenaries, both for the Initiative's image and in case the exiles still harbour resentment towards the Initiative. But before the Charlatan puts up the job posting on the holonet, Reyes thinks he'd better try to win over the Outcasts before they can refuse on principle. There's only one person he can think of to call.

"Zia, before you get mad at me, I have a job for you," he says the moment she picks up.

" _You_ have a job?" The skepticism drips from her voice, but she doesn't immediately hang up, which Reyes takes as a good sign.

"I'm passing one along. You'll want to hear me out, it's the job of a lifetime."

"Then why aren't you doing it yourself?"

"It's much bigger than anything I can handle myself."

"Who's financing it?"

"You get news about the pathfinders out there in Govorkam?"

There's a rustle of fabric, like Zia's sitting up straighter. "You're shitting me."

"They've got big plans, but they need more ships. All the ships you can bring. And you get to name your price."

"You'd better not be lying to me."

"I'm calling you right now from the docking bay at the Nexus. Take a look."

Reyes turns on the camera in his omni-tool and shows Zia the dazzling array of ships passing by behind him, taking off or coming in to land amongst the organised chaos of the docking bay.

"You're crazy," she says with the grin that had won him over in the corner of the makeshift bar that would become Tartarus. "If we both live through this, I'll buy you a drink."

Reyes figures there's about a fifty-fifty chance of the drink containing poison. "Just be there," he tells her. "And get the word out, because if we show up with less ships than the kett do, no one's going to get paid."

-

Only Reyes and the six pathfinders know the location of Meridian. No one else, not even their crew, is privy to the secret, and they'll be bounced from system to system with the rest of the fleet to throw off the kett before they finally arrive en masse at their destination.

"Uh, Reyes?" Scott says two days before _Defiance_ 's scheduled departure. Something's been on his mind for days, but every time he opens his mouth and Reyes thinks he's going to come out with it, he says something else instead. "I'm going to join Sara for this."

Reyes had a feeling it would be something like this, but keeps his voice lighthearted. "We were stuck on the ship together for three weeks and you're already bored of me, huh?"

"No!" Scott pulls Reyes in for a kiss. "I could never get bored of you."

"No, I've got it: you don't want to go down in history as just 'the human pathfinder's brother', you want some of the fame and glory for yourself. Or it's a sibling rivalry thing? Who can activate Meridian first?"

"Reyes." The admonishing tone in Scott's voice is diminished by his laughter as Reyes pokes him in the side. "No, it's just that…we started this together, and I'd like for us to finish it together. Even if the beginning was technically my father and Sara and I didn't even know anything about it. But we can call that the practice run."

"I understand." Scott can no more leave his sister in an hour like this than Reyes can leave his crew. He captures Scott's lips in a slow, deep kiss. "Go be a hero. There'll be all the time in the world for us once this is over."

-

From the Nexus, _Defiance_ 's first stop is Valay. Usually one of the quieter systems, the Initiative resupply station that's been set up near Masiid is a flurry of activity with ships queueing up to be serviced. They also get their instructions for the next system to jump to; in _Defiance_ 's case, they go to Hefena then Joba, then Nalesh, where a bloodbath awaits them.

The resupply station has been blasted to debris, and the ships that escaped the initial attack are being relentlessly hunted down by kett fighters.

"Shit." Reyes is on the bridge, it being closer to his quarters than the control centre when he'd heard the news. "I guess they were bound to find one of our jump points eventually. I'll tell Sara. We should also leave some sort of beacon to warn off the other ships that are already coming here."

Something hits _Defiance_ from behind, but according to the diagnostics, it's only grazed her tail and stern, nothing she can't brush off.

Then Derc says, "Something's pulling us in."

"Forget the beacon, get us out of here," Keema says.

"Easier said than done." Reyes dives into the co-pilot's chair to see what he can do. There's a reason they've always kept their distance from the kett: no one's found a reliable way to escape the tractor beams of their larger ships, and even the grappling hooks of their smaller ships are nothing to scoff at.

Speaking of grappling hooks, some ships pack one alongside their tractor beam, as they discover when something hits _Defiance_ 's starboard wing and latches on. Reyes growls in irritation at the thought of how much work that'll take to repair.

"What was that?" Keema asks.

"Grappling hook, probably." Reyes flips through the external camera feeds until he finds an image that confirms his suspicions.

"Well. We're in deep shit."

It doesn't escape anyone's notice that the kett aren't attempting to capture any of the other ships.

"What could they possibly want with us? The Archon knows Sara's on the _Tempest_ ," Derc says.

"He was only after Sara because he needed SAM to use Meridian. Only, now he doesn't have Meridian's location, and he still doesn't have SAM, and what's the easiest way to get both from the same place?" Reyes says, realisation dawning. Of all the information in Sara's mind they'd been afraid the Archon could use, no one had thought of this. He all but leaps out of his chair and runs down to the operations control room.

"SAM."

**_Reyes._ **

"I don't know if you've noticed, but one of the kett ships has a lock on us and isn't letting go."

**_I am aware of your predicament._ **

"Chances are good the Archon is on his way and he's after you and the map, so I need both of you off the ship. Tell Sara to push forward without us; we'll stall the Archon for as long as we can." Something makes contact with _Defiance_ 's port wing; another grappling hook?

**_Sara wishes me to tell you: No way._ **

"With more profanity, I take it." Reyes can picture her in his mind, indignant and about to take up arms, and it makes him smile. He tries very hard not to think of Scott.

**_Considerably. She also says to sit tight; the_ ** **Tempest _is on its way._**

"No, she has to go on. Convince her for me, SAM, and before you go, scrub all our communication records and scout reports. Don't leave the kett anything to work with."

Reyes destroys the datapads that SAM doesn't have access to, then stabs the computers' hard drives with his omni-blade for good measure after SAM informs him the backup and wipe have been completed.

**_Sara has agreed to make use of_ ** **Defiance _as a distraction and continue on to Meridian. She wishes you good luck and promises to send help._**

"Unnecessary—we've gotten ourselves into trouble before, and we'll no doubt get ourselves out—but the gesture is appreciated. You tell Sara the best way to show up the Archon is to get to Meridian before he does, and tell Scott—" Reyes falters. "Tell Scott I'll be waiting for the moment there's all the time in the world for us, so he'd better be quick about it."

**_I will. Good luck._ **

-

The Archon is much creepier up close. "You have the map," he says.

After _Defiance_ had been unceremoniously deposited into the hangar of the _Verakan_ , Reyes had opened the cargo bay doors so the kett wouldn't try to cut through or force them open, and the crew had been marched out and forced to their knees in the middle of the hangar while the Archon slowly walks back and forth before them.

"What map?" Reyes says so their silence isn't taken for confirmation.

The Archon rounds on him. "You know full well what map: the one to Meridian."

"Who's Meridian?"

The Archon delivers a much heftier backhand than Reyes would have anticipated. Much faster too, and Reyes is sprawled across the floor before the blow completely registers in his mind.

"I'll start with this one," he hears the Archon say. "Keep the others close by."

Reyes doesn't like the sound of that, but as two kett pick him up and start to haul him away, he remembers they're supposed to be the distraction, and wrenches his right arm out of the grip of the kett that's holding it. He knows he's not going to get very far, but every second of delay is another second closer to Meridian for Sara and the other pathfinders.

Reyes is still disoriented from being thrown into the floor so he can't see or hear the others and doesn't even know where they are in relation to him, but he hopes they're also giving the kett a hard time. He writhes and kicks and breaks free of the other kett holding him, and runs towards the first clear space he can see. They won't dare to shoot him while the Archon thinks he's got useful information to share.

Not lethally, at least, but they've got no qualms about shooting at his legs.

Bullets splatter against the metal floor, one catches Reyes in the right calf, and he stumbles, catches himself, puts the leg down, and almost blacks out from the pain that shoots up his leg, through his stomach and his chest, and all the way up to his jaw which he clenches desperately to ride out the sensation and cling to consciousness.

"I tire of chases," the Archon says, looming over Reyes who's on his hands and knees trying to catch his breath.

Electricity crackles in the air just before a jolt of lightning hits Reyes. Every muscle in his body seizes immediately, and the hangar goes brilliant white then black.

-

When Reyes comes back to his senses, he dimly registers the fact that he's in a different room, strapped to a table with a large light positioned over him that's, thankfully, currently turned off. All this information is secondary to the fact that he hurts all over, a deep soreness that usually plagues him when he's held an unnatural position for too long while working on _Defiance_ , and emanating from his lower right leg is a sharpness that he imagines is what it would feel like to be stabbed, electrocuted, and set on fire at the same time.

_You got shot_ , a part of his brain supplies.

_Idiot_ , another part adds. Despite not having a voice, per say, it sounds a lot like Nakamoto.

Except Reyes is alone in the room: no crew, no kett, and no Archon. Wait, that last one was a bit premature.

"I've been to your ship," the Archon says as he ostentatiously floats down the few stairs from the door that he could have easily walked. Fucking biotics, always showing off.

"She's nice, isn't she?" Reyes pulls his face into some semblance of a grin; everything feels fuzzy right now.

"You've done a thorough job of destroying any evidence of Meridian's whereabouts. Unfortunately for you, this only proves that you have something to hide, and if I can't take it from your ship, I'll take it from you."

"You can try." Reyes wishes he'd thought to ask Sara for advice on resisting interrogation, though he supposes not actually having the information goes a long way in not giving it up.

The Archon doesn't waste any more words, just stretches out his right hand towards Reyes.

Reyes' last memory of being aboard _Defiance_ bubbles to the forefront of his mind—all the crew assembled in the cargo bay, unarmed and offering the kett their surrender—as clear as if he were reliving the moment. This must be what the drell feel when caught in a memory recall.

Another memory surfaces: midnight in Ilsana Ward on the Nexus, Scott leaning on the balcony and looking down at the gardens, his face cast in a blue glow by the bioluminescent plant in a hanging basket by his head.

_Too far_ , a voice in Reyes' head that's not his own muses. The image of Scott freezes, blurs, then changes.

More recent: _Defiance_ 's bridge, the way his stomach drops when they're caught in the tractor beam even though outwardly he plasters on his usual expression of cool nonchalance. This is it, this is how they go; all those years of exile and they'll give their lives for the Initiative after all. He should have blown the ship and not let them be taken alive, but they've never sat down as a crew and had the conversation, and now it's too late—

_A little further…_

A vidcall with the _Tempest_ : Sara's gleeful face as she reports that the trace has been successful, and that they should all return to the Nexus to discuss their plan of attack.

_Almost there…_

Waking up from cryo: he stumbles out of his pod, nauseous and disoriented, only the _Welcome to Andromeda_ vid playing on a loop in the cryobay reminding him of where he is. The ratio of medical professionals to newly awakened is abysmal; the Nexus isn't ready for the next wave of colonists, but in the chaos, nobody's remembered to turn off the schedule in the VI in charge of revival.

Reyes feels a rush of annoyance that couldn't possibly have come from him—this is ancient history now, and there was nothing to be annoyed at in the first place—then the memories start coming faster.

Kadara Port, _Defiance_ , the Nexus, Arcturus Station, Earth, Voeld, the Citadel, Elaaden, Eos. The rapid cycle stops, leaving Reyes feeling dizzy despite not having sense of a corporeal body.

"It's not Meridian!" Sara yells over the vidcall as she stands in a cavernous room with remnant architecture. "We came all this way and it's not fucking Meridian!"

And Reyes remembers where he is, what he's supposed to be doing.

_You can't see this_ , he thinks fiercely. _I won't let you_.

The image of Sara blurs, and Reyes thinks as hard as he can of a different memory, one that's etched into his brain: Scott, in warm sunset tones, just a little too wide-eyed and clean-cut for the likes of Kadara Port. Then a little later that same night, dishevelled from an unexpected duel and hasty exit. The moment for a kiss under starlit skies that had passed them by.

_Where is Meridian_ , the Archon demands.

Reyes plays the memory again, this time focusing on the feel of Scott's hand in his as they take to the dance floor, the knowledge in the back of his mind that they're being watched, and maybe, just maybe, he's showing off a little—

The extravagantly festooned ballroom is replaced by the cold sterility of a room on the _Verakan_. The Archon is leaving, presumably to sift through the others' memories, but not even Derc knows the full route. The Archon will be back, and Reyes will hold out for as long as he needs to.

-

Time passes in irregular bouts of consciousness. Sometimes the Archon is there, sometimes it's other kett—scientists, maybe—who poke and prod and shine lights into his eyes. Everything feels numb now, so he wouldn't even know if they were carving pieces off him, and it's getting increasingly difficult to direct the interrogations where he wants them to go.

He thinks of _Defiance_ , sitting in the corner of the shipyard at Kadara Port ready to be hauled off for scrap. He'd laid eyes on her and known she was the one, spent many a sleepless night replacing damaged parts and upgrading outdated tech while Keema visited every day, shaking her head and bemoaning that they'd never leave the ground, all while moving her things into the captain's cabin.

He thinks of the first time Derc had taken a shortcut through the Scourge, of all the shouting from everyone else on the bridge convinced they were headed for a fiery death, of the disbelief and elation when they'd come out the other side with nary a scratch.

He thinks of one of the upgrades he and Lynx had installed to _Defiance_ 's engines, how the ship had spun in wild circles like a theme park ride shortly after taking off because the pressure equaliser they'd installed hadn't come with instructions. None of the others had found it as amusing.

He thinks of the first time he and Crux had outflown kett pursuit in the shuttle. Once they'd docked with _Defiance_ and jumped safely to FTL, their relief had manifested as hysterical laughter in the shuttle cockpit, leaving them teary-eyed and gasping for breath. They'd scared off Lynx and Keema who had come to see what was taking them so long to get out.

He thinks of Nakamoto, never cracking more than a reluctant, exasperated smile in all their eight years together but always quietly settled in a corner on crew movie nights, and always on board when it's time to leave even though Reyes knows he gets a dozen better offers at every port they make.

In a darker moment, grasping for a memory strong enough to hold on to, Reyes lets himself remember the grief and anger that had consumed him at waking up in another galaxy to find his parents hadn't tried to send him a message after he'd gone into cryo—the Nexus wouldn't have been too far to receive transmissions for years, and there were always the arks, which had come bearing late farewells from friends and family who'd regretted not saying goodbye.

He thinks of the first time Kadara had come into view after the exiles had so proudly removed themselves from the Nexus only for their zeal to fade away when nothing but the unending dark unfolded before them.

He thinks of the first time he saw an Initiative recruitment poster: A chance to be someone, he thinks. He waits for the second wave of applications to open, when the skills they're short on are advertised, then puts more hours into the flight simulator over the next few weeks than he's ever completed until then.

He thinks of Scott again, a warm weight in his arms as they lie together in Reyes' bed while _Defiance_ 's drive core thrums comfortingly in the background.

He thinks of the control centre, a cluster-wide network of information at his fingertips, more power than he could have ever dreamed of commanding, yet he's put Collective operations on hold in favour of chasing after Meridian to the far-flung Saajor system—

He thinks of—

The Archon leaves and doesn't come back.

-

The faceplate of a helmet slides into his field of view, the rest of the helmet covered by a hood that leads Reyes' gaze down to a suit more streamlined and elegant than the clunky hardsuits most frontline fighters favour. It's a quarian enviro-suit, realises some part of his brain that's still working.

"I am Senna'Nir vas Keelah Si'yah, the quarian pathfinder," the quarian says. "Pathfinder Ryder sent me to get you out of here."

"Reyes Vidal," Reyes slurs, not quite sure if he's imagining things, "mechanic of the smuggling ship _Defiance_."

A soft chuckle. "She said you were brash."

"I resent that; I'm the perfect balance of impulse and restraint."

There are other people in the room with them, and one of them finds the control panel and releases the straps holding Reyes on the table.

"Can you walk? Nevermind, here."

A needle jabs Reyes' arm and releases a flood of painkillers and stimulants into his bloodstream. Someone pulls his left arm around their shoulders and helps him off the table.

"Let's go." Senna motions for his team to move out.

The drug cocktail does a fantastic job at waking Reyes up, but it can do little for the fact that he's been lying on a table for what must have been days, and he can't keep his legs from collapsing under him every other step. He distantly wonders if anyone has gotten around to fixing the bullet hole in his leg yet, which might account for why the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other escapes him right now. There's also a tightness in his chest that stops him from breathing in all the way, and every few breaths, the edges of his vision fade a little more. But other than all that, he's feeling great. Like he might actually live to see Scott again.

The quarian supporting Reyes is taking nearly all his weight now, and the two of them lag behind the pathfinder team until Senna notices and sends someone back to take up Reyes' other side. The kett bodies they pass tell Reyes the team had cut their way through the ship to get to him, but for some reason, they're still employing stealth.

"Where's the Archon?" he asks his minder as they wait in an alcove for the others to clear the way ahead.

"He's on the ground. The other pathfinders are holding him off."

"We're here, then? At Meridian."

The quarian nods.

"Have you seen it? How's it look?"

_Like a ball thing_ , Sara had said when Reyes had asked. She'd then helpfully formed a circle with her hands.

"Like it could be home."

That raises so many questions, but Reyes doesn't get the chance to ask for more information before they're moving on again.

They come out of the maze of identical corridors in a hangar that looks familiar to Reyes; either all hangars on the ship look the same, or they're leaving the same way _Defiance_ came in.

"Beta team has also completed their mission and are waiting for us on _Karom_ ," Senna says. "Let's go before the kett call for backup."

"Wait! My ship." Reyes can see _Defiance_ 's tail between the parked kett fighters, in the opposite direction to where they're about to go. "We can't leave without her." She's probably in little better condition than a pile of scrap right now, but it doesn't feel right to leave her behind after all they've been through together.

Senna pauses, then because quarians know how to treat a ship right, he nods and says, "We'll give her a tow."

"Good man." Reyes reaches up to clap him on the shoulder, but all that happens is he starts sliding towards the ground. Several voices shout in warning, and though someone catches Reyes before his head hits the floor, his vision still goes blurry then completely dark.


	18. The Way Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just because they've found Meridian doesn't mean it's over yet, but everyone can take a moment to catch their breaths.

Reyes is lying down again when he comes back to himself, but on a bed, not a table. And though there are plenty of things attached to him, none of them are actually holding him down, as he discovers when he pushes himself upright using the bedrails for support. He can hear people talking quietly and moving around him, but they're hidden from view by a curtain drawn around his bed.

He can't figure out how to lower the bedrail and the task of swinging his legs over it seems insurmountable, so he remains how he is, awkwardly slumped against the headboard, arms braced against the bedrails to keep him from sliding down. He remembers everything that had happened on the Archon's ship right until he'd blacked out, and though Senna had implied the rest of the crew were safe, Reyes needs to see for himself.

He clumsily runs his hand over the buttons on the right side of his bed, hitting all of them without looking at the labels. Though if his powers of deduction are working properly, he's on a quarian ship and won't be able to read anything without his omni-tool anyway.

The curtain around his bed is pulled back to reveal Nakamoto, wearing a doctor's coat and a stethoscope. Reyes almost doesn't recognise him for a split second.

"Lie down before you break something," Nakamoto says, one hand reaching for the penlight clipped to his coat pocket while the other presses a button by the bed to raise the upper half.

"Look at you," Reyes says weakly, exhaustion sweeping over him as he leans back against the pillows. "You look just like a real doctor. And we look like we're in a real medbay. How does that make you feel?"

"Ecstatic." Nakamoto leans down and shines the light into Reyes' eyes.

Reyes flinches, hard. He knows where he is, can still hear the bustle of the medbay around him, but the light fills his vision, and for a moment, the smooth sheets and soft pillows become cold, unforgiving metal.

The light goes away and the medbay comes back into focus. Nakamoto's hands are on Reyes' shoulders, preventing him from falling over. The penlight lies discarded atop the blankets.

"You need more rest," Nakamoto says as he gently pushes Reyes back onto the pillows. He goes to press a button on one of the myriad of machines by Reyes' bed, presumably to knock him out.

"Wait." Reyes fumbles for Nakamoto's hand and misses, but Nakamoto pauses anyway. "How's everyone else?"

"Alive. Relatively well. They can come see you next time if you feel up to having visitors."

"Sounds good."

Nakamoto hits the button and Reyes' eyelids grow heavy as he belatedly realises he hadn't asked about Scott or Sara or Meridian or the Archon or the pathfinder team that brought him here. He wasn't really that tired and could have stayed awake a little longer to get answers, but Nakamoto's already tucking the blanket around him and pulling the curtains shut.

-

The ward is a lot quieter when Reyes next wakes up, and darker, too; it must be in the middle of the night cycle. There's the regular beeping of machines in the background, shuffling and snoring from the other patients, and the soft swish and thud of doors opening and closing elsewhere on the ship.

Nothing seems out of place, which leads Reyes to wonder why he'd woken up when he'd successfully slept through the busier parts of the day. Then, not far away is a soft crash and a curse as if someone's tripped over a piece of machinery. Through the curtain, Reyes sees a light flare up then dim again as the person on the other side reprimands their omni-tool. Reyes recognises that voice.

"Is that you, Scott?"

The muttered insults stop, and the curtain near the foot of Reyes' bed flutters as Scott slips in, his omni-tool emitting a faint glow. As he nears, Reyes can see a bandage wound around his head, padded more heavily on the left side, but other than that, he seems to be in good health.

Scott stops short of the tangle of wires that are coming out of Reyes, and rests his hands on the bedrail.

"Hi," he says softly. "How are you feeling?"

"Fantastic. These are great drugs." Reyes' leg is bandaged right around where the bullet wound is, and elevated on a folded blanket. When he flexes it experimentally, he doesn't feel so much as a twinge of pain.

Scott doesn't laugh. "I thought I was going to lose you."

"I'm not at all easy to get rid of. Ask anyone I've pissed off."

Scott does chuckle at that, and gently runs his fingers along the side of Reyes' face.

"What happened to you?" Reyes reaches up towards Scott, and a slew of wires follows the movement.

"I kind of got shot in the head." Scott gently pushes Reyes' hand back down. "I was wearing a helmet so it's not as bad as it sounds, but I still got benched. So much for finishing this together."

"You did what you could. Come here, sit down. Tell me what I missed."

"I should get back to my own bed before the shift changes. I just wanted to see you."

"You'll come visit in the morning?"

"If they let me."

" _Scott_." After all this, he's still ever a stickler for the rules.

Scott carefully leans over and gives Reyes a feather-light kiss. "I'll see you soon."

Scott manages to return to his bed without bumping into anything, and Reyes listens to him get comfortable somewhere further down the medbay. The night regains its usual quiet, but Reyes remains wide awake, thinking about what's going on right now outside the ship, and how much he's missed out on. He's half tempted to get out of the bed, but no one's actually told him what's wrong with him yet to necessitate being hooked up to so many machines, and it would be most undignified to be found in a heap on the floor somewhere after detaching himself.

Fortunately, a nurse makes her rounds not long after, and she's in agreement of him needing to rest, administering a sedative that knocks him out before she's closed the curtains around his bed.

-

The curtain at the foot of Reyes' bed has been drawn back completely when he next awakes. The bed opposite him is empty, as is the one to the left of it. The one to its right has someone sitting on the edge of the bed that Reyes can't see until he leans forward a little and catches a glimpse of familiar red hair.

"Crux!" he calls out. Or tries to, at least, but his mouth is so dry it comes out more like a strangled cry, drawing the attention of the nearby doctors and nurses.

Crux hears Reyes anyway, and gives him a small wave over her shoulder. Her doctor, who turns out to be Nakamoto, leans forward just far enough to glare at Reyes and motion for him to lie back down.

A nurse brings Reyes a glass of water, scrutinising him as he drinks to make sure he doesn't down it too fast. Once she leaves, Nakamoto comes over, followed by Crux with a brace around her right ankle.

"Just a sprain," she says before Reyes can ask, sitting down on the end of his bed. "Nothing worth wasting medi-gel over."

"You seem to be healing well," Nakamoto says, examining one of the screens Reyes is hooked up to.

"Then why do I still feel like shit?"

"Fatigue. Malnutrition. Dehydration. You've just woken up and haven't had any caffeine yet. Take your pick. Either way, it's not something that requires you taking up a bed in the medbay when we've got shuttles of freshly wounded coming up from the surface every ten minutes." Nakamoto reads a message on his omni-tool. "Speaking of which, one's just arrived. I'll be right back."

"So what happened after we got split up on the _Verakan_?" Reyes asks Crux.

"We got put into separate rooms and the Archon paid each of us a visit," she says. "Tried to get Meridian's location out of us, realised we didn't know anything, and tossed us into a room with about twenty other poor bastards ready to be shipped off for exaltation."

"A rescue party came for you too, I take it?"

"Yes, but we were already breaking out by then, so we sort of met in the middle."

"Sounds like I missed out on all the fun."

"Hardly. Keema says she saw _Defiance_ in _Raelah_ 's hangar; how'd you pull that off?"

"Quarians," Reyes says fondly.

He learns that Derc had been admitted to the medbay early on to sleep off the effects of having someone rummage through his memories—he'd copped it the worst after Reyes, having known a portion of the route—but thanks to his salarian metabolism, had been discharged after a few hours and is now flying supplies down to the surface of Meridian, which the carrier _Raelah_ they're currently on is orbiting.

Crux, Lynx, and Keema got out relatively unscathed, and in the two days Reyes was out, Lynx has busied herself with joining a maintenance crew on _Raelah_ while Keema has been directing Collective operations.

Crux also tells Reyes about what she's heard while being confined to Habitation Deck 4—the deck they're currently on— _Raelah_ might be a non-combatant, but she's the primary source of supplies and medical aid for all the others engaged in the fight for Meridian, and every shuttle that arrives has something different to report.

Scott comes over as Crux is explaining to Reyes what Meridian actually is—an artificial, self-contained, and perfectly climate-controlled planet, which isn't nearly as outlandish as some of the theories that had been proposed—and offers his own knowledge, having actually been down to the vault.

Ten minutes into a thrilling recount of the fight with the remnant architect that had taken Scott out of commission, Nakamoto comes back and chases Scott and Crux away so he and a nurse can give Reyes one last checkup before unhooking him from the machines and sending him on his way with a wheelchair and a pair of crutches since medi-gel isn't being dispensed right now for non-life-threatening injuries.

Keema's waiting at the entrance to the medbay with Crux and Scott by the time Reyes makes his way over. She's holding herself a little tenderly, but outwardly looks fine.

"Don't we make a sorry bunch?" Reyes says, mentally tallying the number of injuries between them. To be honest, it's not that bad if who they're going up against is taken into consideration.

"Speak for yourself," Keema says. "I'm the pinnacle of health. Why don't—"

Scott's omni-tool starts beeping, loudly and insistently. He rushes to answer it. "Sara?"

"Guess who's a big damn hero, Scotty boy?" Sara's voice yells through the speaker of Scott's omni-tool.

"Did you—the Archon?"

"Dead. Meridian? Activated. The cluster? Saved." There's a noise in the background that sounds like a high five.

"Not until we've hunted down the last of the Archon's lieutenants," Keema interjects.

"Is that you, Keema? Stop trying to rain on my parade."

"Rain on—I see. Perhaps you should hold off on holding parades until the weather clears."

"The weather is as clear as it's been in ten years; I think we can afford to celebrate a little. Listen, I'll be coming up soon if you want to be at the entrance to bask in my glory."

"I would love to," Scott says with a laugh, "but there's still a battle going on outside, and I don't think the invalids I've been saddled with are going to be allowed to leave the ship." Scott yelps as Reyes hits him in the shin with a crutch.

"I know someone who knows a journalist," Keema says. "Prepare your victory speech; we'll find a room here with a decent projector and be sure to bask appropriately."

Scott suggests the mess hall where they're also likely to find the largest concentration of people, and while they make their way over, Keema arranges for a news crew to be present at the entrance to Meridian's vault. Reyes still doesn't have an omni-tool, so he grabs Scott's and messages Lynx, Derc, and Nakamoto to come to Mess Hall 4 for the best news of their lives.

Derc's on Meridian with front row seats—Reyes tells him to record his own vid, for proof and bragging rights—but Lynx joins them, and so does Nakamoto, with a muttered, "lunch break," when they give him questioning looks.

"This is Keri T'Vessa, coming to you live from Meridian, with news that human pathfinder Sara Ryder is about to emerge from Meridian Control," says the asari journalist on the screen over the sounds of gunfire and ship engines. It looks like Scott was right—the battle still wages fiercely on the surface with neither side knowing what's transpired in the vault. "While we wait, I have with me turian pathfinder Avitus Rix." The camera pans to Avitus, who's not far away with his helmet off, apparently enjoying a brief respite from the fighting.

Keri interviews Avitus about his role in the fighting—holding the entrance so more kett don't enter and hinder the other pathfinders' progress—then gives the other fighters behind the blockade their minute in the limelight, which is summarily overshadowed by Sara emerging from the vault. Everyone in the mess hall falls silent and gives the projection on the wall their full attention.

Sara removes her helmet and looks at the troops gathered before her. Reyes has listened to enough military speeches that he thinks he knows how this one will go, but then Sara says, "the Archon is dead. Meridian is ours, and with it, we will at last be able to find a home in Heleus."

On the screen and in the mess hall, people erupt into cheers. Keri rushes forward to ask Sara where they'll go from here, and what they'll do about the remaining kett and any Alliance that refuse to defect.

"Even with the vaults activated, some planets may take years, even decades to be habitable again, and some may have been irreversibly damaged by the Scourge," Reyes just barely hears Sara say over the manic celebration. "And of course, the Scourge still poses a threat to our survival, as do the kett and their loyalists, but for now, I think we can afford to take a moment to catch our breaths. Our commanders will call upon the people to fight once more after we've had time to assess our new situation."

"That was Sara Ryder, human pathfinder, and I'm Keri T'Vessa, coming to you live from Meridian."

-

Sara retires to the _Tempest_ , currently parked in the middle of the base that's looking to be the first outpost on Meridian. She sends Derc to _Raelah_ to pick up _Defiance_ 's crew for a quieter, more close-knit celebration, which surprises Reyes as he'd expected her to seek out the company of her fellow pathfinders, and even had a quip about fading into obscurity prepared for the next time they met.

Sara's in the conference room taking a vidcall from her father when they arrive, and it sounds like they're arguing about SAM. The conversation finishes just as Reyes has painstakingly made his way to the top of the ramp—the Tempest is built for business with little thought given to the comfort of anyone on board who's not the pathfinder, and there is a woeful lack of comfortable seating on the ship—and though Sara might tolerate her father more than Scott does, it's apparent there's no love lost between them either.

"I can't believe you made me leave you behind." Sara leans against the conference table and crosses her arms. She's still in her armour, scorched by gunfire and what looks like acid; her face and hair are smudged with blood, sweat, and dirt; and there are dark circles under her eyes, but despite that, they're bright and alert. Stimulants, probably.

"It was the right decision and you know it. Thanks for sending help, though." Reyes stifles a groan as he raises his injured leg to rest it on the couch. The painkillers are staring to wear off; he'll have to raid the Tempest's medbay before he leaves.

"I hear some of you barely needed rescuing at all." Sara looks around the room at the rest of _Defiance_ 's crew.

"It's amazing what ideas the brain is capable of coming up with when your only options are escape or exaltation," Crux says. "Still, I don't think we would have made it off the ship without a little help from the outside. So, thanks."

"I should be thanking you. All of you; I would never have made it this far without your help."

"What about that time Keema threatened to sell you out for a bounty?" Reyes asks.

"But she didn't, and I appreciate that."

"You need to hold your friends to higher standards," Keema says.

"Everything worked out, didn't it? My standards are fine. Now, are we going to get this party started, or what?"

Sara's crew start to filter into the conference room, depositing food and drinks on the vidcon unit.

"By all means, let the festivities begin."

Either Sara's come prepared for this moment, or she's managed to scrape together enough drinks and finger food for nearly twenty people in the hour since she'd emerged from the vault. There's even a playlist of songs Sara instructs SAM to play, consisting mostly of upbeat dance tracks that Reyes recognises from one of the radio channels Derc keeps on low in the background when things are quiet on the bridge. Almost everyone is too exhausted to actually dance, but the music keeps their spirits high and the conversation lively until late into the night.

It ends with Reyes half-asleep on one of the couches in the conference room, Scott passed out on top of him smelling strongly of moonshine and quilloa chips. By the sounds of things, the party is still going strong downstairs, but everyone who's partied out has staggered back to their beds or up to the conference room where the lighting's been dimmed and there's something soft to sleep on.

Reyes wakes up halfway through the night to near-complete darkness and only the sound of too many restless sleepers in the one place. Scott's got his head nestled against Reyes' collarbone and is drooling onto Reyes' shirt in a most unattractive manner, but Reyes can't find the strength to push Scott off his completely numb right leg, which is probably for the best since he hasn't managed to get his hands on any painkillers yet.

Scott falls off the couch at some point without even waking up, only rolling over so that he's as close to the couch as possible with Reyes' hand resting lightly on the back of his head. Reyes idly runs his hands through Scott's hair, and the soothing motion sends him back to sleep.

-

There are soft footsteps making their way across the room, and Reyes can turn his head just enough to see that Nakamoto's coming towards him.

"Oh good, you're awake," Nakamoto says.

"Not so good; I can't get up." There's a sharp pain in Reyes' chest that gets worse when he tries to sit up, so he's been lying completely still on the couch for what feels like an hour. Not knowing what time it is, he hadn't wanted to wake everyone by asking SAM to fetch help. He can breathe perfectly fine if he doesn't move, after all.

"This might help." Nakamoto holds up a syringe and steps around Scott so he can administer its contents.

Within seconds, the pressure is lifting off Reyes' chest. He sits up and takes a deep breath while Nakamoto watches him closely.

"Come down to the medbay." Nakamoto helps Reyes get off the couch without stepping on Scott, then passes him a single crutch from behind the couch and supports his other side.

There's a shortcut to the medbay that involves climbing a ladder, but Nakamoto makes them go the long way, down the cargo lift and through the hallway on the lower deck.

Reyes is out of breath and mildly lightheaded by the time he lies down on one of the beds, but he doesn't need to relay this development to Nakamoto, who's already pulling an oxygen mask over Reyes' head.

"When the kett cut you open," Nakamoto begins.

"When they _what_?" Reyes tries to say, except his words are muffled by the oxygen mask, and Nakamoto continues like he didn't hear.

"They didn't close you up very well. Then that quarian pathfinder gave you as many stims and painkillers as he could fit into one shot, and you got dragged all over that ship without feeling what you were doing to yourself. Honestly, when I saw you on _Raelah_ , I thought you were destined for the morgue. You're lucky we got in just before wounded started arriving en masse from Meridian and there was still enough medi-gel to stop you bleeding out. I told you back on _Raelah_ to let me know the moment you had problems breathing."

"I don't remember that. I probably wasn't listening."

"That does sound like you."

Nakamoto starts undoing the buttons on Reyes' shirt, and he looks down out of curiosity. There's a prominent scar running right down the middle of his chest that he doesn't remember being there before, and the entire area around it is a deep purple and red. Nakamoto gently presses down on the bruise, and Reyes hisses at the bone-deep pain the painkillers can't quite mask.

"You have some internal bleeding," Nakamoto says, apparently unconcerned by this development.

"Is that good?" Reyes asks.

Nakamoto gives him a flat glare and runs a handheld scanner over his chest. "It doesn't look too severe; I suppose the kett have vivisected enough humans over the years that they didn't find you interesting enough to keep going once they'd opened you up. At any rate, it should stop soon without intervention. Otherwise, I'll have to poll the crew for blood donors."

"And if there aren't any?" Between Crux, Reyes, and Nakamoto, none of them have compatible blood types. It's just as well that Reyes and Nakamoto usually stay out of action involving blood loss, except in the past few months where Reyes has been stabbed or shot a disproportionately large number of times.

"Then it's not looking too good for you."

"Anyone ever tell you your bedside manner sucks?"

"Never had anyone complain and live to tell about it before."

Nakamoto sets up a line of IV fluids and tells Reyes not to move a muscle while he goes to get breakfast. Scott comes into the medbay not a moment later, looking frantic but calming down once he sees Reyes.

"Back in bed, huh?" Scott rolls over the chair from a nearby desk.

"I may have overdone it yesterday," Reyes says. "You know, what with all the…sitting. Standing. Talking. Lying down."

"Sounds exhausting." Scott takes Reyes' hand in both of his.

"What about you? How's your head?"

"Terrible. But that might just be the hangover." Scott buries his face in Reyes' side and remains like that until Nakamoto comes back. He doesn't immediately lift his head, which leads Reyes to think he's fallen asleep until Nakamoto tilts Scott's head slightly to run a scan, and Scott makes a small noise of protest and tries to wriggle away.

"You should get some sleep in an actual bed." Nakamoto lets Scott go. "Not that one," he says when Scott tries to get into the other bed in the medbay, "Lexi might need it for real patients. All you need to do is avoid screens and strenuous activity for at least twenty-four hours. Go."

-

Visitors and patients drift in and out of the medbay as Reyes remains on the _Tempest_ under the watchful eye of Doctor T'Perro, Nakamoto busy with the field hospital outside that's slowly being transitioned into a permanent one.

It's a week after Sara's victory over the Archon that Reyes actually gets to see Meridian for himself. He'd caught glimpses of it while being shuttled between _Raelah_ and the _Tempest_ , and on screens in the background of pictures and vids, but it's another thing entirely to step outside to soft grass beneath his feet and a brilliant blue sky above his head. He can even hear the roar of a waterfall off in the distance, and see insects flitting through the bushes.

"So, this is Meridian," Scott says, offering Reyes his arm.

Reyes doesn't need the support—medi-gel usage is gradually dipping below its production levels which means everyone can go back to slathering it onto every scratch and splinter they obtain—but he loops his arm through Scott's anyway and they walk across the field to the base that's been set up outside the vault entrance.

"This is so much nicer than the Nexus. How long do you think it will be before we ruin this place with our clumsy attempts to bring civilisation here?" Reyes asks as a convoy of shuttles carrying prefabs flies overhead. The leaders of various factions—including the Collective, though Keema has been handling most negotiations on Reyes' behalf while he's been convalescing—have been in discussion for days now over what to do with Meridian.

"Don't be so pessimistic," Scott says. "I'm sure the leadership will sort something out."

"You haven't been listening in on the councils they've been holding. The angara aren't too bad, but remember, the Nexus leadership are the same people who signed all of us over to the kett."

"Even people who didn't support unification agree it saved more lives than continuing to fight would have."

"I know, but it doesn't mean we like it." Every time Reyes looks at the Nexus leadership, he thinks of the shuttle-loads of people marched off to the exaltation chambers for the slightest infraction. It's been years since he's seen exaltation carried out en masse—not that it's stopped, judging by the number of prisoners recovered from the Archon's ship—but the image is forever burned into his memory. "You ever watch those vids of people being exalted?" Reyes asks.

"Wh—no! Why would I?"

"In the beginning, the kett would broadcast them, thinking it would keep people in check, like back in the day on Earth when public executions were all the rage. Then they realised it was only turning people against them, so they stopped. But the vids are out there. Not saying you should watch them or that the Initiative should have fought all the way down to the last man, but…" Reyes shakes his head. "You're right. We should try to start anew."

Scott stays quiet as Reyes thinks aloud to himself, and by the time they arrive at the front gates of the base, Reyes has a renewed hope for the future of Heleus. "It might not be so bad," he tells Scott as a guard checks their ID and logs their names.

Scott waits until they're out of earshot of the guards to reply. "And if you don't like how things are going, you can always withdraw the Collective's support and go back to being an outlaw."

"That I can. Why are we here?" Scott had asked Reyes to join him on a walk, and Reyes, eager to be out and about, had agreed without a second thought.

"You've never been inside a remnant vault, have you?"

"We're actually going in?" Reyes can see the doors to the vault entrance just ahead of them, currently closed and surrounded by all sorts of scanning equipment.

"The pathfinders have been through the place a few times—what's accessible from this entrance, at least—and pronounced it safe for the scientists to go in and conduct research. I hear some people also want to open up sections of the vault for the public to visit, like a museum. Whether or not that ends up happening, I got Sara to clear us for a visit."

Of all the things Reyes might have expected the vault to look like, 'remnant city' didn't even make the list. "Those are trees," he uselessly points out. "Actual trees. Growing underground."

"Do you need a minute?" Scott teases him.

"I'm going to need much more than a minute to process all this, but by all means, lead on."

Scott takes him across the ledges and platforms to the other side of the gaping chasm and deeper into the vault. They pass teams of researchers and guards set up along the way, but soon, it's just the two of them traversing the dark corridors. Scott seems certain of where he's going though, so Reyes tries not to dwell on how long it'll take someone to find them if they get lost.

"Here we are." Scott stops in a large chamber with little of interest except a glowing blue device floating in the middle of the room. He touches the device and the floor falls away beneath them.

They're…not falling, not exactly. Floating, rather, in a downwards direction. Glowing glyphs painted on the walls fly past them as they descend.

"A gravity well," Reyes guesses.

"Or, a shortcut. But whatever you do, don't say 'gravity well' in front of SAM or he'll be sure to tell you all about how it's actually a well with variable gravity."

The gravity well drops them off in a nondescript chamber like the one they'd just come from, but then Scott leads Reyes through a set of doors and down a ramp, and the sight makes the long walk in the dark worth it.

It's…otherworldly. Exactly what one might have hoped to find on the other side of a six-hundred-year journey across dark space.

The room is even larger than the one they'd found themselves in after coming through the entrance, with four long walkways supported by remnant pillars leading to a huge rhomboid structure pulsing with white light like a heartbeat. In fact, the whole place feels alive with the crackle of electricity running through the glyphs etched on the walls.

"So, this is what we've been fighting for," Reyes says.

"This is it. Meridian. When Sara turned it back on, it activated all vaults across the cluster. Soon, there'll be plenty of golden worlds to go around."

"Oh, I suspect we'll still manage to find something to fight about. But at least from here on, they'll be troubles of our own making."

Reyes could spend a lifetime drinking in the remnant technology here and taking it apart to find out how it works. But he's got a ship to hunt down and repair, and a crew to get back together and take to the skies once more.

When they head back up to the surface, there's a commotion outside the base.

"Trouble?" Scott asks Avitus, who's approaching them.

"Just the opposite, actually. Your father is here."

Scott's face immediately falls, and Avitus hastens to find them another way out of the base that will allow them to bypass the reporters and journalists trying to get an interview with the man who brought the pathfinders back and made all this possible.

Over the coming days, someone gets the bright idea of taking a family picture for the history books, and Scott is careful to keep an eye on his father's whereabouts so they're never in the same place at the same time.

Reyes tracks down _Defiance_ , sitting quiet and forlorn on the outskirts of the camp the species of the _Keelah Si'yah_ have made away from the main Initiative bases. There's a rift between them that's not Reyes' job to heal, and he's content to straddle the line for now if it doesn't get in the way of getting his ship off the ground.

He moves out of the _Tempest_ medbay once he gets new solar panels installed on _Defiance_ and life support is back up and running, and Scott doesn't hesitate to follow. The reporters might have figured out he's been hiding on the _Tempest_ , but _Defiance_ 's role in the proceedings is less well known, and the colonists of the _Keelah Si'yah_ won't stand for people snooping around trying to figure out if they're hiding Scott.

More camps spring up around the initial landing site, even scavengers managing to plant their flag on Meridian while the Initiative and Resistance are busy squabbling over who gets a claim to what. The Charlatan—who's behind the screen alternates between Reyes and Keema depending on whoever's not otherwise occupied—quietly sits in on the leadership meetings and says nothing while the Collective carves out its own space atop a cliff with a clear view of the others' bases. Someone's going to be pissed when they find out, but it would do the Charlatan's reputation a disservice to play nice for too long.

As Reyes continues to work on _Defiance_ , all but building her up from scrap again like the first time they'd met, he runs into some familiar faces who've also come to Meridian. Aureus has brought _Galante_ , packed full of supplies, and a fleet of armed shuttles that had helped keep kett reinforcements from entering Meridian Control. He sells Reyes new plating for _Defiance_ 's tail and stern, and lends him a few extra hands to get it installed.

Thrasia produces a hydraulic crane for the cargo bay out of nowhere when Reyes asks around for one. She refuses to tell him where she got it from, but there's an Alliance logo stamped along one edge of the boom. Reyes sands it off and paints over it.

Zia corners him in a supply depot while he's carrying an armful of satellite components he can't quite decide if he wants or not.

"You're alive," she says.

"As are you," he replies. "Congratulations. You did show up for the fighting and not just to pick up the scraps afterwards, right?"

She scoffs in a complete non-answer. "How about that drink?"

"How about we leave things here and call it even between us? The running, the chasing…it's tiring. I'm tired."

Zia grins, not entirely unkindly. "The Ryder boy's made you soft."

"Or the years have finally worn me down."

"Unlikely. Goodbye, Reyes. Give my best to Ryder."

"Sure won't. Goodbye, Zia." Reyes doubts this is the last they'll be seeing of each other, but it feels like the tension between them has finally settled.

Velonia's at the depot for parts to repair her ship too, but she's charging everything to the Initiative's tab under 'work expenses' since she's only on Meridian to do a job for them. After half a second of consideration, Reyes does too, leaving the depot with parts for an upgrade to _Defiance_ 's satellite communications array she doesn't strictly need.

Reyes sees little of _Defiance_ 's crew until they mysteriously come flocking back right after he's patched the hole in the starboard wing where the grappling hook had sunk its claws in, and is ready to take her for a test flight.

"This is so typical of you," he says when he sees them assembled in the cargo bay admiring the repair work. "All of you. Always leaving me with the hard work and only showing up when it's time to leave."

"I've been working," Derc protests as he passes Reyes on the catwalk. "Nothing flies quite like this girl does, though." He reaches out to give the wall a loving pat.

"I've been unloading supplies from the relief shuttles." Crux picks up the bags at her feet and follows Derc to the upper deck.

"Me too," Lynx says, not entirely convincingly. She has three crates on a platform trolley that she wheels into one of the hidden compartments in the cargo bay. "Let me know if we're headed to Ratul anytime soon."

"I had to put up with the lot of you as patients all at once." Nakamoto makes a beeline for the medbay with a stack of datapads in balanced in the crook of one arm. "I'm long overdue a break."

Keema, the last into the cargo bay, closes the doors behind her and joins Reyes up on the catwalk.

"Well?" Keema nudges him with her shoulder. "Is she ready to fly?"

"Let's take her for a spin."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter left to wrap things up! We're almost there!


	19. Home and Away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's still much to do, but things eventually settle into a new status quo.

The Alliance proves to be a difficult ball of loyalties to untangle, even with all major kett forces routed and no longer able to keep them in check. A month after Meridian, a new faction calling themselves the Loyalists nearly take over Netiquur, the very planet where _Defiance_ had nearly lost Nakamoto, Scott, and Sara in one fell swoop. Not about to let the past deter them, they've found themselves on the planet again, this time accompanied by pathfinders Vederia and Avitus. The plan is to try diplomacy first, then if that fails, call in the fleet hiding an hour away behind Prachonyi.

"What kind of a name is 'the Loyalists' anyway?" Crux grouses as she digs a hole in the sand with the heel of her boot. "How could anyone be loyal to the kett after what they did?"

Despite their growing numbers and influence, little is known about the Loyalists beyond the fact that they're moving into previously kett-owned spaces and have been attacking Initiative and Collective supply routes. Whether they're truly supporters of the kett or just another group of outlaws looking to take advantage of the chaos is unknown, but a suspiciously large amount of their numbers have been identified to be ex-Alliance.

"The name could be a cover," is all Reyes says to Crux.

"Don't tell me even the Charlatan himself doesn't know. What happened to your network of spies?"

"Keep your voice down."

"Who's going to hear?"

They're in the desert outside Cantlyn Hold hidden amongst an outcrop of boulders with no one else around as far as the eye can see, but an essential part of secret-keeping is assuming someone is listening at all times.

"Hear what?" Scott drops down into their hiding spot from his perch atop the boulders.

"Who indeed?" Reyes says to Crux.

She rolls her eyes as she asks Scott, "Know anything about these Loyalists?"

"They don't seem interested in talking, if the way the turrets on the walls keep moving are any indication."

"It was a mistake to let three pathfinders walk into their stronghold," Reyes says. How had no one raised an objection before things had gotten this far?

"If three pathfinders can't handle a bunch of outlaws with guns, do they really deserve to be called pathfinders?" Crux muses.

Off in the distance, in the direction of the outpost, comes a series of rapid popping sounds.

"What about outlaws with machine guns?" Scott climbs back up on top of the boulders and looks through his rifle scope at the outpost. "And turrets? No, it looks like SAM has the turrets. I think they'll be okay after all."

The Loyalists begin to flee in shuttles and ATVs, some towards the mountains where Collective agents are waiting, others towards the desert where Reyes, Crux, and Scott are hidden.

"Here they come," Reyes says, readying the trigger for the EMP devices they've buried under the sand to disable the ATVs. For the shuttles, Scott's traded his Widow for an EMP gun and takes aim at the sky along the shuttles' flight path.

The EMPs do the job almost too well, stranding the fleeing outlaws right in front of them. Keema, Derc, and Lynx are somewhere a few hundred metres to the west, and a few hundred metres to the east is a squad of Initiative soldiers, but they're both too far away and likely too busy dealing with their own problems to come over and help.

They're supposed to try and take the Loyalists alive in the hopes that they can be convinced to return to the Initiative, but bullets can be shot faster than tranquiliser darts, and being so outnumbered, Reyes would rather kill than be killed.

"Help's on the way," Scott yells over the gunfire.

Reyes looks through a gap in the boulders and is treated to the sight of another ATV speeding across the desert: the familiar outline of the _Tempest_ 's Nomad.

"Just in time," he says as he reluctantly puts down the Sovoa he's been itching to use—it'd been a gift from Sara, brand new out of Initiative R&D—and throws down a power cell instead to deploy a barricade and help them hold their position until the Nomad arrives.

Sara launches herself out of the hatch before the Nomad completely stops, charging straight into the pack of Loyalists and knocking them out from behind the ATVs they're using as cover. While Scott, Reyes, Crux, and whoever Sara's brought with her are busy shooting the Loyalists with tranquiliser darts, she lets loose a nova to stun those near her, and takes care of the ones further away with precisely-placed shots. The fight is over in minutes, and quiet settles over their part of the desert.

"No power in the 'verse can stop you indeed," Reyes says as he emerges from behind the boulders.

Sara grins at him. "I must've given you quite the scare on Fribourg."

"That you did. Scott says you never learned to fight before becoming a pathfinder. You must have had, what, six months of training at most?" The Systems Alliance considered six months enough training before sending out the cannon fodder to die, but it didn't teach you skills like what Reyes had just seen.

"At most. Though most of the credit has to go to SAM; all I do is try to stay in shape."

"That's…"

"Cheating? Quite."

They leave a beacon for the transport ships in orbit to lock onto, then the Nomad goes east and Reyes, Scott, and Crux go west. The whole operation is wrapped up before sunset, and _Defiance_ and the pathfinders are off to their next mission to destroy an exaltation facility on Eos.

"My agents tell me the kett have withdrawn from all remnant sites on Eos to their outposts," Reyes says to start off their mission briefing. He's still hiding his identity on calls, but he's pretty sure the other pathfinders have caught on that the Charlatan is operating out of _Defiance_.

"Makes sense," Sara says. "The remnant were the Archon's thing; the Primus is more of a traditionalist: conquer, exalt, and move on to the next galaxy."

"We should drive the kett from Heleus completely while we still can," Avitus says. "Our people are tiring of war. They came to Andromeda to build, not to fight, and now that there are golden worlds for them to settle on, that's what they want to do. The militia numbers grow smaller every day."

"I tire of war too." Sara sighs. "And as pathfinders, we should be on the ground with our people, scouting the worlds for them. But we should at least destroy as many exaltation facilities as we can while we still have the numbers to launch large-scale attacks. Then everyone will be able to breathe a little easier."

They remove the two exaltation facilities on Eos from the face of the planet, and the other three pathfinders and the Resistance do the same on Voeld and Havarl. That marks the end of their planned large-scale operations, and though the Resistance and Collective gradually withdraw their military support to focus on rebuilding, and the pathfinders take on more of their original duties, they agree to continue dismantling kett outposts they come across to ensure the kett never have that kind of power in Heleus again.

The Collective is attacked on the homefront when half the docks at Kadara Port goes up in flames and a shadowy figure with a distorted voice claiming to be the Charlatan takes responsibility for the attack, apparently as retribution for Sloane trying to move her Outcasts back into the void of power left by the Collective, which has been spread thin by rebuilding efforts across the cluster. No one was killed in the attack, but tens of people were injured and the bill for the damage incurred to the structures, cargo, and ships docked in the area is in the millions of credits.

People start flocking back to the Outcasts—even those who'd left to join the Collective—after Sloane gives a rousing speech about needing to stand together against a faceless organisation that seeks only to use people then cast them aside. Reyes immediately deploys spies to infiltrate the Outcasts while they can hide themselves in the influx of new recruits, but this is a problem too big to be handled behind terminal screens through encrypted emails and scrambled calls, and it's with great reluctance that Reyes asks Keema to take her place as governor of Kadara.

-

They're not sentimental people, the crew of _Defiance_ , but they can't let Keema go without a goodbye party. It's a relatively small affair in the private room on the upper floor of Tartarus the day before the big announcement, with just the six of them. Scott and Sara are at Kralla's Song to give their crew of eight years a moment alone.

They spend hours drinking heavily and reminiscing about the bad old days, back when there'd been seven of them and the highlight of their lives had been raiding an Alliance outpost or kett supply depot, to when they'd become six and it'd been years since unification with no sign that things were going to get any better. They'd lost hope, Reyes realises as he reviews their last eight years. They'd kept fighting, in their own largely inconsequential way, but it hadn't been towards any end besides keeping themselves alive and their ship afloat.

"It's the end of an age," he declares many drinks later. "Our captain is leaving us, our enemies are vanquished, and we've all but gone legit. If anyone else wishes to leave, speak now or forever hold your peace." Drunk as he may be, he's dead serious, and he stares at each of the crew in turn until they give him his answer.

"Please," Derc says, "who else will fly that bucket of bolts for you?"

Nakamoto, red-faced but otherwise perfectly composed, raises a single eyebrow as if offended Reyes would even think to ask.

"All my stuff is on the ship," Lynx says, and downs the rest of her drink.

"I don't have any reason to want to leave," Crux says. "Unless you give me one."

"You can't leave," Reyes says. "Who'll be our captain then?"

"Me?"

"Yeah, you've got that—that—" The word is just on the tip of Reyes' tongue, but he can't for the life of him remember it. "That thing leaders have. You've got it."

"Integrity?" Keema suggests. "Confidence? Passion? Vision? Acumen?"

" _Gumption_ ," Reyes triumphantly settles on, then squints at Keema. "How do you know so many words right now?"

"It wouldn't be a very good start for the Collective if I make my first speech while hungover." Keema's holding onto a tall glass, and now that Reyes thinks about it, has been holding onto it this whole time so it won't get topped up when someone reaches for the jug to refill their own glass.

"You don't want to be captain?" Crux asks.

"I don't have time for that," Reyes says. "And if I recall correctly, once the captain leaves, the title usually passes on to the second-in-command. In this case, you."

"But I thought—"

"If you don't want it, that's fine." Reyes turns to Lynx. "Congratulations on the promotion."

"Hey!" Crux exclaims. "I want it. I'll be captain."

Keema raises her glass to toast Crux's new station before Reyes can rib her about how captains need to be decisive.

"We're five now," Derc says after they all drink. "Not that I think we won't be able to handle it, but things could get a little tight without an extra pair of hands to go around."

"What we need is a co-pilot," Reyes says. "I was thinking of asking Scott."

"He doesn't know how to fly."

"He's a fast learner. In the meantime, he can push whatever buttons you tell him to. I'm already working two jobs, I can't be on the bridge as well being your button-pusher."

"I suppose the company will be nice."

Surprisingly, Scott is the harder one to convince.

Reyes catches a quiet moment with him at the docks the next morning just before Keema's slated to make her speech, and broaches the subject.

" _Defiance_ needs a co-pilot." Reyes throws an arm around Scott's shoulders. "What do you say?"

Scott hesitates. "We came to Andromeda to find a home."

"This is home."

Scott looks back at _Defiance_ , and there's none of the fondness and thirst for adventure in his eyes Reyes knows are in his own when he looks at the ship. If what Scott wants from Andromeda is a house with a garden on a quaint suburban street where he can raise a few kids and watch them kick a ball about on the lawn, Reyes can't ever give that to him, and it might be for the best if they part ways now.

"Scott?" Reyes says quietly.

The speakers overhead crackle, and the screen of arrivals and departures on the wall fills with static.

"We'll talk about it later," Scott says.

Traffic around the docks comes to a halt as Sara's face fills every screen in the port. She's making a joint appearance with Keema to make it clear that the pathfinders have thrown their lot in with the Collective.

"People of Kadara," she begins, her voice a clear and by now familiar sound. "This past week, you have been led to believe the Collective was behind an attack that left the docks in chaos and cost many of you your credits and livelihood. I assure you everything you've heard is a lie, as I have personally been working closely with the Collective, and I know their goals are in line with yours: peace and prosperity on Kadara. And not only on Kadara, but throughout Govorkam and the rest of the cluster.

"I know it can be hard to put your faith in an organisation that hides in the shadows, but today I introduce to you your new governor: Keema Dohrgun, a native of Kadara like so many of you."

Sara steps out of frame and is replaced by Keema.

"Kadara has been many things to us all," she begins. "A wasteland, a prison, a refuge, a home. Some of you have been here, as I have been here, since before kett landed on our shores. We were a lost people even then, scattered and disorganised. It took the arrival of new aliens to deliver us from the hands of the kett, and though we will remember their strength and courage, we will not spend the rest of our days cowering in their shadow. Sloane Kelly has seen us through war, but we are in a time of peace now, and the leadership must change to reflect that.

"As governor, I will see Kadara Port restored to the trading hub it once was, free from the excessive tariffs and restrictive licences imposed by the Outcasts. Senseless violence will no longer be tolerated, not by citizens, off-worlders, or those sworn to uphold the law. We will bring civilisation back to the Badlands and make it a place where one can live without fearing for their life. And finally, all who were exiled will be offered a chance to return."

The camera pans back to Sara. "I also have a proposition I'd like to present to you: an Initiative outpost, Ditaeon, has been constructed to the north of Sulfur Springs and is in need of colonists for mining and farming operations. All who do not seek to cause trouble or bring harm to others will be welcome, regardless of where they've come from or who they were in the years past. And as Kadara is the closest major hub of civilisation to Meridian, you are all in good position to find yourselves there someday should you wish for a change of scenery."

Right, they'd gone that route with Meridian: the who's who of Heleus—the Nexus leadership, the Quorum from the _Keelah Si'yah_ , and someone called the Moshae to represent the angara—had gathered on Meridian for endless rounds of discussions, and when they'd emerged from the building where they'd been sequestered for days, they'd decreed that Meridian, where all of Heleus would get their fresh start, would be free of the factions that had divided the people for so long. Instead, like the Citadel back in the Milky Way, each species would be represented on a council that would be responsible for looking after the interests of Meridian and its residents.

All outposts that had already been founded on Meridian had been given a grace period to either get out or officially renounce all past affiliations. Since the Collective outpost had been in such a prime position, Reyes had graciously turned it over to the Meridian authorities and let go of the agents who'd wanted to leave. He'd kept a few on the Collective payroll though, just in case, as, he's sure, did the other gangs and factions who'd made it to Meridian before the perimeter had been secured.

As for the Collective's operations elsewhere, Reyes has grown too attached to the idea of having eyes and ears in every corner of the cluster to recall his agents back from their postings. Fortunately, still having a crew to run the ship means he can periodically check in on them in person while _Defiance_ continues to operate as an independent contractor—with Collective leanings when convenient—running cargo of questionable legality for similarly dubious clients.

The future is looking bright, save for the growing shadow cast by the uncertainty of his future with Scott. Scott had muttered something about meeting Sara after she'd finished her speech, and though he'd promised to think about Reyes' proposal, he'd hurried off without looking Reyes in the eye. Reyes had wanted to follow him and continue their conversation until they'd worked something out, but the Collective had demanded his attention once again, and Reyes wasn't about to leave Keema in the lurch on her first day as governor.

Morning turns into afternoon turns into evening, and once all the metaphorical and a few literal fires have been put out and the Collective's hold on the port is once again secure, Reyes returns to _Defiance_ to find that Scott hasn't returned all day. He hasn't tried to call Reyes or send any messages either, but at least his scant belongings are still where he'd left them. Reyes stays up late, hoping to catch Scott coming back at whatever hour that may be, but he falls asleep around two in the morning, and when he wakes up, the other side of the bed is still cold.

-

"So, this is goodbye."

Reyes and Keema are standing in _Defiance_ 's cargo bay looking out across the docks at the efforts of their hard-won victory come to fruition.

"Only if you let it be," Keema says. "You know where to find me."

"That's up to our captain." Crux has settled easily into the role, and is currently on the bridge with Derc charting their next course.

"You should know a thing or two about mutinies by now."

"Yes, I'm getting to be quite the expert."

"That being said, don't give Crux too much of a hard time. At least not for the first month."

"We'll be fine, Keema. How about you? We didn't get to talk much about what the pathfinders found at Khi Tasira."

The remnant city that wasn't Meridian was the birthplace of the angara, apparently. The revelation had slowly leaked out after Meridian, but Reyes hasn't been keeping up with how the angara have been handling the news.

Keema leans against a stack of crates. "I've decided it's not that big of a deal. We were all created somehow, right? What does it matter what the exact circumstances were? These jardaan aren't around anymore, and even if they were, if the shitshow of the past few decades has taught us anything, it's that our lives are our own, to fuck up or improve."

Reyes chuckles. "I always knew you were secretly an optimist."

"I'll be fine, Reyes. What about you and Scott?"

"He continues to confound me."

"Still hasn't made up his mind?"

"He'll come around," Reyes says, more confidently than he feels. "He hasn't moved his things out of my room yet." Not that he has much to move out in the first place.

"If he doesn't, you might consider staying a while on Kadara. _Defiance_ won't fly as well with five, and I've got scores of new recruits I can throw at our problems instead. Where are you headed? Elaaden?"

"They'd only just make things worse, and you know it. We'll manage, with or without Scott. How's your bid for democracy shaping up?"

"Slow in the making, but if Sloane is willing to partake, it'll move things along."

"Sounds like you have things well in hand. If you ever need anything, remember we're only a call away."

"Oh, I won't forget."

There's nothing left to say between them so instead of prolonging the goodbye, Keema nods and makes her way back into the port. Reyes, ever so slightly more sentimental, watches her go until he loses her in the crowd.

"Reyes." His mind elsewhere, Reyes doesn't notice Scott until he drops a heavy bag on the floor between them.

"Packed your things, have you?" Reyes says with a heavy heart.

Scott holds up a small terrarium. "I picked up some stuff to liven up the place. Figured if I was going to be living here for…however long it ends up being, I might as well have a say in the decor." The terrarium is shaped like a hanar, with wires running through its legs and a cord coming out of the base that suggests it lights up.

"You're staying?" Reyes asks, to leave no room for misunderstanding.

Scott exhales heavily and nods. "Sara talked some sense into me. I guess I'm going to be around for as long as you'll have me."

Reyes feels a smile growing on his face. "You'll never be rid of me."

"Good."

Scott leans in, and Reyes meets him halfway for a kiss.

"Just one thing," Scott says when he straightens up.

"Oh?"

"The _Tempest_ has a bio lab. They grow fresh fruit and vegetables in there. It really beats the frozen stuff."

"We can do that." They can hardly use the passenger rooms for their intended purpose now that _Defiance_ is serving as the Collective's mobile control centre. Converting one or two into aeroponic gardens won't be difficult, especially with Sara's standing offer to provide _Defiance_ with whatever upgrades she needs to support the Collective. Reyes knows how to fill out the requisition form in such a way that the Nexus mechanics won't question anything he asks for.

"And a cargo lift so we don't have to keep climbing these stairs."

"One thing at a time." Reyes hefts Scott's bag over his shoulder. "After all, we've got all the time in the world now."

"Let's go, then," Scott says with a grin. "You should probably teach me some of this co-piloting stuff before we get into one of those situations where we're running for our lives again."

Reyes gives Derc the all-clear and hits the button to close the cargo bay doors. He looks outside one last time before they leave, and drinks in the sight of the morning sun spreading its rays over the port that's gradually being rebuilt and scrubbed clean of its Outcast paraphernalia. They'll be back, but who knows how much the port will have changed by then?

Then he spots a fight breaking out a few landing pads down, a ship's captain and one of the dock managers having a furtive conversation in a dark corner, and the guards chasing a pickpocket through the market. Maybe things won't change that much after all.

-

Just as they leave atmo, there's a screech and a tearing sound from somewhere underneath the bridge.

"What was that?" Crux asks as she looks out the front window.

A sheet of metal drifts into view.

"Looks like a primary buffer panel," Reyes says from behind the co-pilot's chair.

"…Is it ours?"

Reyes points at the monitor and Scott presses a button, bringing up a graph of the ship's fuel usage history.

"I could not have been more clearly pointing at the button next to it," Reyes says.

"They all look the same!" Scott protests as he presses the correct button this time and the graph is replaced by a schematic of the ship. The section under the bridge is flashing orange.

"It was labelled 'fuel'. Do you need glasses?"

"I don't need glasses. It's the font."

"A piece just came off our ship," Crux interjects. "Should we be concerned?"

They watch as the piece of metal gently bumps against the bridge windows.

"Things turned out alright last time." Reyes never did remember to look up what purpose a primary buffer panel actually served.

"What about that?" Crux points at the flashing warning on the monitor.

Reyes reaches past Scott and exits the diagnostic program. "Problem solved. Let's go."

"Brave new world indeed," Scott mutters.

"Hey," Reyes says, "that's my line."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This marks the end of the longest fic I've ever written! Thank you to everyone who left kudos or a comment, and I hope you all enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it :)


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